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.

My husband and I needed a break from the heat last weekend, so we ventured out to the movie theater. We decided to see Horrible Bosses – I’m a Jason Bateman fan, and my husband (not surprisingly) finds Jennifer Aniston quite talented. As the storyline unfolded – three friends plotting to kill their respective bosses – I started thinking about how many memorable films have depicted frustration and dissatisfaction in the workplace.

One of the first movies that came to mind was 9 to 5 starring Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, and Lily Tomlin. In 9 to 5 the women dream of murdering their overbearing, humiliating, and sexually harassing boss. In this case, their accidental murder attempt (never keep the rat poisoning with the coffee creamer) resulted in kidnapping their boss and taking over his job. Ironically, the organization had greater productivity, work life balance, and employee satisfaction under their reign. This film provided a great portrayal of some of the frustrations and barriers women faced during the 1980s.

More than a decade later, the film Office Space provided a comedic outlet for anyone who was being downsized, analyzed, or bored by a mundane work environment. After a meeting with an organizational efficiency consultant, Peter Gibbons plots to steal money from Initech with the help of two friends: Samir and Michael Bolton. When this plan works a little too well, the men try to correct their mistake and end up watching their company be burned to the ground by their disgruntled co-worker, Milton.

Flash forward to last weekend. Once again, Hollywood portrayed three friends working for arrogant, micromanaging, and sexually harassing bosses. Each friend faces unique challenges in his work environment, but the sentiment is the same: the work environment will improve with a staffing change.

In addition to providing a humorous take on the workplace’s daily frustrations, these films have a common theme: they illustrate that leadership plays a vital role in employee satisfaction and motivation in the workplace. In a presentation I recently attended, the speaker asked the audience how many people had worked for a bad boss. The show of hands was astonishing! When asked what these individuals found frustrating, we heard responses like volatile, micromanaging, and manipulating – adjectives related to interpersonal style and behavioral characteristics, rather than skill or intelligence.

Although the Hollywood portrayal of these bosses may be dramatic and comedic, these individuals do exist in the workplace, and organizations need to provide opportunities for self-awareness and development.

If not, we may have more cases of disgruntled employees – minus the money laundering and murder plots (of course).
 

An acquaintance of mine was recently sharing her on boarding experiences for a job she just started. She was hired her based on her experiences with dynamic talent management projects and they assigned her the mission of driving progressive change in the organization’s candidate selection and leadership development programs. An early indication of the obstacles standing in her way became clear when a colleague said, “Before we brainwash you into doing business as usual around here, tell me your ideas.” At least they were self-aware of their problem!

I’ve been hearing about this same phenomenon across other organizations and industries. The organization’s leadership team has steered the company to a significant level of success due to a combination of certain strengths but given recent industry shifts, the future upward trajectory of the company appears limited due to a combination of certain weaknesses or a perceived lack of required capabilities. The leadership team then decides to drive strategic change by hiring a new leader that exhibits these complementary attributes. The next progression of events can be described as being very similar to the medical occurrence of transplant rejection.

Transplant rejection occurs when a transplanted organ is not accepted by the body of the transplant recipient. The immune system of the recipient attacks the transplanted organ because the purposed of the immune system is to distinguish foreign material within the body and attempt to destroy it. This is what seems to happen with some leadership teams. They ask for someone new to join the group to essentially offer a unique, dissenting voice. They must play resident devil’s advocate to stimulate diverse ways of thinking and ideas to enact change. However, these teams display a tendency to reject the new ideas in favor of their tried-and-true approaches. The initial strategy of incorporating a change agent into the mix is replaced by directly or indirectly motivating the new employee to conform. The new leader then typically elects one of two options: assimilation or attrition. In assimilation, the leader adopts the team’s prevailing methods and customs as a means for survival. In attrition, the leader recognizes that making a case for change is a losing battle and leaves the company. In either scenario, change is compromised.

In the medical world, doctors overcome transplant rejection by determining donor-recipient match. In the talent management realm, we must adopt a similar practice of ensuring leader-team match based on two critical components. First, we must ensure proper fit between the individual leader and the current team’s style and organizational culture. Second, we must ensure match between the candidate’s capabilities and the competencies required to drive change and elevate the business beyond current performance levels. Some leaders may be a great fit with the team, but do not bring the necessary behaviors to the table to help the company adapt to industry shifts and evolve. On the other hand, some leaders are potentially effective change agents yet, when hired into the wrong team, they could appear like a bull in a china shop and clash with others. Identifying and selecting leaders with both the mentality and tools to drive change AND attributes to connect with colleagues is a balancing act. We can break this balancing act down into the simple model of starts, stops, and continues.

Continue What Got You There
I’ll start with the “continues.” We must identify leaders who can continue (or at least respect and support) the traditions and strategies that have made the leadership team and organization successful. Some organizations refer to this as their DNA. When teams are self-aware and understand how the flipside (or dark side) of their strengths may actually be holding them back from further success, the immediate reaction is to assume that they need to overcorrect in the opposite direction. Operationally-sound leaders think they need to shed their current methods to become highly creative and innovative. Collaborative, enabling leaders see an opportunity to switch their mentality and adopt an entirely top-down, forceful behavioral style. These are ineffective shifts and likely not humanly possible. It is important to remember to retain and maintain the behaviors that led to success in the first place. Leaders that are hired to drive change must also display these core competencies in order to support a continuation of effective behaviors (or at least allow others who exhibit these skills to contribute to the team).

Stop Doing What Is Not Working 
There are two kinds of “stops.” First, we need to evaluate candidates and select leaders with low risk for the counterproductive behavioral styles that are holding back the success of the current team and leading to derailment. For one of my healthcare clients, the focus was on screening out leaders who were overly cautious on high stakes decisions and reacted to pressure by appearing as closed-door managers in a highly collaborative culture. They already had too many of those individuals. However, given that they were trying to hire more ambitious, big picture types, they needed to incorporate a second kind of “stop” in the candidate evaluation process. The goal here was to stop the potential problem of hiring leaders with too much a good thing. For this organization, it meant that targeting confident change agents must be tempered with reducing the likelihood that you will end up with arrogant risk takers who are not willing to partner with others on decisions. In some cases, we must put a figurative ceiling on these behaviors. Be careful what you ask for, you just may get too much of it.

Start Doing What Needs To Be Done
The “continues” and “stops” mitigate the risk of leader rejection from the team. Combined with that approach, selecting for the “starts” is what allows us to stack the deck in favor of not just leader retention, but also successful execution of strategic change. This new leader still needs to bring some unique ingredients to the overall team recipe to take things to the next level. We typically think of change as being linked to creativity, risk taking, the development of new products, etc. Yet the need for change could also be represented by a team that is highly innovative and cutting-edge and requires a new leader to the join the group to provide stability related to finances and operations. The behaviors that the leadership team needs to start demonstrating usually represent a balancing of the current preferences and capabilities of the incumbent leaders. The end result is not a 180 degree shift and likely resembles a more balanced, versatile team composition. 

The start-stop-continue model, with a focus on balance, is a matter of identifying leaders who display the “continue” behaviors, do not exhibit significant risk for “stop” behaviors, and show high potential for the required unique behaviors to enable the team to “start” moving in a new direction without losing their DNA. Keep in mind that selection of the right leaders with the requisite capabilities, fit factors, and low likelihood for derailment is really just the beginning. Ongoing leader and team development is critical to promote long-term success. Back to the transplant analogy, talent management professionals and executive coaches serve in the capacity of doctors who help the patient (i.e., leadership team) through the post transplant recovery process (i.e., ongoing leader and team development) so that the team can gel and overcome challenges.

Blogging is another means of communication that reflects a person’s attitudes, ideas, interests, and values. Many of these characteristics gel with a few others to ultimately make up an individual’s personality or as we refer to it here at Hogan – “reputation.”

Companies and employees spend quite a bit of time and money on employee development programs. These engagements are designed to make an employee aware of behaviors that impede their performance, future opportunities, and relationships with other employees.  Let’s face it, changing reputation takes a lot of effort. To be successful, an employee must target specific, non-desirable behaviors time and time again until their natural derailing tendencies are curtailed and replaced with new desirable ones. If they are successful, other people’s perceptions of them change and so does their reputation.

However, it only takes a few oversights to erode their progress of change. One such oversight, that can undo all of their hard work, is not managing their online personality. With the pervasiveness of social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, often an employee forgets these sites are an extension of themselves. Like it or not, blogging creates reputation. In many instances, an employee can have more than 1,000 connections, friends or followers on these websites. Trying to keep track of which people are outside the corporate circle, not somehow otherwise connected to co-workers or even future employers, is just not manageable.

When creating your development plan to change negative components of your reputation, don’t forget to consider and include your personality found in social media. It just may make the extra difference in changing your behaviors and ultimately your reputation, getting you that promotion at work, and strengthening your relationships with your co-workers.