CEOs and executives helm the ship by encouraging their crew to work together and use resources at hand. Although some guide their teams safely to their destination, others end up lost at sea. Organizational and executive coaches can help leaders keep their teams on track when they begin to flounder.

5 Suggestions from the Hogan Coaching Network for Building an Effective Development Framework
1. Provide education and training. Formal programs, classes, or workshops; coaching; mentoring; webinars; or on-the-job training are all valuable resources to build and reinforce an employee’s skills and improve performance.
2. Leverage strengths. If a leader lacks creative and innovative ability but excels in effective teambuilding, he or she can leverage his or her ability to create an environment that facilitates and nurtures the team’s new and different ideas.
3. Compensate with alternative behaviors. Use positive behaviors to rebuild a reputation marked by counterproductive behaviors. As positive behaviors are demonstrated multiple times, the manager’s reputation will begin to change, and often new behaviors become the person’s natural behaviors.
4. Support weakness with resources. When someone has a clear weakness, such as micromanaging, sometimes the most effective development strategy is to compensate by supporting the employee with additional resources, such as a direct report who excels at dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s.
5. Redesign the job or assignment. More effective than allowing an individual’s performance to flag, it is sometimes possible to alter an individual’s job requirements to remove key roles or responsibilities and assign him or her elsewhere in the organization.

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Is there such a thing as being too creative? Although creativity is largely associated with positive work outcomes, our research shows that, in excess, creativity can be a powerful roadblock to career success.

To understand how creativity can harm an individual’s career, we must look at personality from two perspectives: bright-side personality and dark-side personality.

Bright-side personality describes the strengths and weaknesses people display when they are at their best. Dark-side personality describes personality characteristics that are strengths under normal circumstances. Under the increased stress, pressure, or boredom of most work environments, people tend to overuse those strengths, and they can become powerful career derailers.

Creative people often have parents who emphasize their uniqueness and favor creative expression over convention. As adults, their ability to comfortably work outside of societal norms makes creative individuals valuable sources of potentially important ideas. However, highly creative individuals also tend to focus too much on thinking outside the box, often at the cost of their ability to clearly explain their ideas or follow through.

For more on performance implications and recommendations for coaching highly creative individuals, download our white paper, Way Outside the Box.

Providing candidates with accurate feedback about the behaviors they should keep doing, stop doing, and start doing is the first step to improving their interpersonal effectiveness. The Hogan Personality Inventory, Hogan Development Survey, and the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory provide useful feedback about what individuals need to do to improve their performance at work. This interpretation guide uses a simple, but focused, series of steps to help affect behavioral and repetitional change for the coaching candidate. Visit our bookstore to purchase Coaching Strategies.

As more organizations are forced to do more with less, speed coaching provides a fast, agile and cost-effective way to enhance the performance of key employees before they derail.

The viability of an organization depends upon the quality of its future leaders, yet limited resources often pose significant obstacles to providing them with necessary coaching and development. During her session at GSC SHRM, titled “Speed Coaching – Limited Resources but Unlimited Development,” Patricia Kellett, director of the Hogan Coaching Network, shared several strategies for using speed coaching to develop future leaders.

Trish discussed how speed coaching can be effective in changing behavior by sharing a case study of Bob, an employee who was recently promoted to supply chain manager for his company. Although Bob knows the business well and is effective at relationship building, his supervisor hears from team members that Bob’s meetings tend to go on for too long, and that he is indecisive, not open to new ideas, and gets overwhelmed by a more assertive employee.

As Bob is proficient in several key areas of his role, she explained, it would be a waste of time and resources to have him go through the typical linear development cycle. Instead, it is more effective to provide him with speed coaching in the few areas in which he needs improvement. By providing targeted speed coaching that builds on his existing strengths and develops his competency companions, or the existing skills that can be used to improve his performance in other areas, he can be a more effective leader.

To ensure an organization has a pipeline of future leaders it can count on to assume key positions, it is imperative to understand the assets and liabilities of these individuals. As each company has several team members who may not be perfect, but are still too good to lose, their supervisors need to provide targeted development that prepares them to meet future needs. Through speed coaching, they can provide their high potential employees with fast and effective development that drives their performance, but won’t drain financial resources.

In the face of ever-shrinking budgets and less resources to devote to employee development, many companies face a similar problem: providing current and potential leadership with critical professional development opportunities.

Executive coaching programs often span more than a year, in which a coach helps the participant develop skills and augment behaviors necessary for future success. These engagements are known as skills coaching and are designed to enhance the skillset of the participants.

Yet, skills coaching fails to heighten one’s strategic self-awareness – the understanding of one’s strengths, weaknesses, and behavioral tendencies and how these characteristics compare to those of others.

Awareness coaching, on the other hand, uses assessment results and a series of short coaching sessions that put the ownership of development on the participant. In such engagements, the employees receive a series of short coaching sessions supported by personality data, where they receive suggestions for behavior changes geared toward increasing workplace performance.

Finding cost-effective and impactful methods for leadership development is crucial to success. Using the power of assessments to make leaders aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, rather than teaching them new skills, or ways to improve their existing behaviors, employers can ensure they have a bench full of high-potential employees ready to step in to key leadership positions.

To learn more about awareness coaching and to see a case study of how one company experienced positive results through this method, review our white paper, Awareness Coaching.

The modern economy is changing more and more rapidly than ever before. Companies depend on their leaders to guide them through this turbulent marketplace, making the availability of savvy, well-developed leaders a crucial part of business suc­cess. However, a recent survey found that although the majority of HR directors identified high-potential leader development as their most important focus, more than 80% of those surveyed expected their HR budget either to shrink or stay the same.

This leaves many HR managers struggling to answer an important question: In such a cost-driven busi­ness atmosphere, how can companies still provide critical professional development opportunities to their leaders? “Awareness Coaching” demonstrates that by combining the powerful science of personality assessments with a limited number of coaching sessions, companies can provide a highly impactful, cost-effective experience for their high-potential employees.

I worked with an organization several years ago to develop a leadership coaching program. When I asked my client what the problem was, he said, “It is okay to be a jerk as long as you’re hitting your numbers.”

The organization’s sales leaders were operating in an alienating manner, but this behavior was excused because they were meeting their goals. When those sales dipped, they didn’t have trusted confidants to point out industry and competitive shifts that led to the decrease.

I liken this to the feedback some people receive regarding the things they say and the way they say them. It’s one thing to be right, and quite another to be rude about it. For a leader, being right is driving successful business results. Saying those things in the right way demonstrates the humility necessary to build relationships. Both factors must be present for individuals to attain leadership excellence.

Now consider NBA basketball star LeBron James. In the 2010 offseason, James signed as a free agent with the Miami Heat and faced a storm of criticism as the result. Why was he vilified when so many players in the sports world today opt to go the free agent route? It all goes back to what you say, and how you say it.

LeBron could have chosen a team to sign with and demonstrated professional courtesy to the other teams under consideration by informing them of this move in advance of holding a press conference. Instead, he strung teams along, including Cleveland, and announced his decision in a highly publicized and criticized ESPN live special entitled “The Decision.” LeBron and his Miami Heat teammates then hosted what appeared to be a post-championship celebration in their home arena before the season had even begun. Rather than a confident showman focused on the new goal ahead, many fans and media members saw arrogance and over-the-top flamboyance. The most notorious moment came when LeBron discussed his new team winning multiple championships as if it was a foregone conclusion.

LeBron was now firmly cast as a bad guy, yet even in this new role and on a new team he came up short yet again in the NBA championship series. The sports media criticized LeBron for not performing up to the level expected during crunch time moments of the 4th quarter. Unlike the last time he lost the big game, he was not given a pass.

This is the essence of leadership derailment. Derailing behaviors tend to emerge as coping mechanisms when we face stress or adversity. Over time these behaviors erode relationships. In the grand scheme of things, our positive achievements may outweigh our derailing moments in terms of sheer number. Regardless, the magnitude and weight of those derailing actions when we are at our worst tend to overshadow much of the good work we have done. 
LeBron was likely coping with stress and adversity. He had always lived and played basketball in Ohio up to that point, and last season was clearly a time of stressful decisions and transitions. His charisma, showmanship, and confidence allowed him to harness his talents and become an MVP. These same characteristics became strengths overused and the negative moments are quickly becoming the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of LeBron. The 2012 season appeared to be the year of a humble King James until a recent altercation with a fan during a game has further perpetuated his bad guy image.

On my way to the airport this week, I heard a sports talk radio personality characterize LeBron as a good guy who tends to say or do things in big moments that rub people the wrong way or bring into question his ability to deliver in the clutch. These derailing moments will likely permeate his legacy and overshadow his multitude of great on-the-court achievements unless he is able to win multiple championships. Like those sales leaders I worked with years ago, it’s okay to be a jerk as long as you are hitting your numbers; however, true greatness is likely achieved through equal doses of driving results and demonstrating humility.