Search Results for: leadership skills

This is the Career “Kiss of Death,” according to Lee Iacocca

April 2, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Auto industry icon Lee Iacocca wrote in Iacocca: An Autobiography (1986,)

There’s one phrase that I hate to see on any executive’s [performance] evaluation, no matter how talented he may be, and that’s the line: “He has trouble getting along with other people.”

To me, that’s the kiss of death. “You’ve [the evaluator] just destroyed the guy,” I always think. “He can’t get along with people? Then he’s got a real problem, because that’s all we’ve got around here. No dogs, no apes—only people. And if he can’t get along with his peers, what good is he to the company? As an executive, his whole function is to motivate other people. If he can’t do that, he’s in the wrong place.”

A significant predictor of success in most professions is being easy to get along with. People who’re well-liked, work well with others, and help them do their jobs well will advance in any organization. Those who don’t usually don’t get as far.

Idea for Impact: Interpersonal relationships in the workplace are at the heart of the matter

Leadership is influence. Leadership isn’t about titles, positions, pedigree, distinction, or corner offices. A leader who can encourage, inspire, and direct others’ efforts will be effective in any endeavor.

If you’d like to exert more influence on your boss and inspire more cooperation from your peers and colleagues, work on being genuine, pleasant, sincere, easy to talk with, and friendly—without becoming desperate to please others.

Too, develop the antennae for what motivates people by respecting their ideas and values. That may sometimes necessitate holding back your own.

Read Dale Carnegie’s masterful manual on people skills, How to Win Friends & Influence People (1936.) Jeswald Salacuse’s Leading Leaders (2005; my summary) can help you expand your persuasive skills for situations where you may not have much influence over others.

Some Lessons Can Only Be Learned in the School of Life

November 19, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How Anil Ambani Learned the Ropes of Doing Business in India

In the Fall of 1982, Anil Ambani, scion of one of India’s wealthiest family, returned home to Mumbai, then Bombay, after attending the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Anil had fast-tracked through his two-year MBA program in less than 15 months.

He met up with his father Dhirubhai Ambani and announced, “Look, Dad, I’ve become an MBA, and I’m going to take a break since I worked hard. I will see you in the New Year.”

Dhirubhai asked, “I am very happy and delighted that you accomplished this. Since I did not go to any formal school or college, I do not have any degree, why don’t you tell me, from your learning at Wharton, what does an MBA stand for?”

Smug and self-satisfied, Anil replied, “That’s simple. Master of Business Administration.”

Dhirubhai countered, “An MBA represents Manē Badhā Āvō che,” (Gujarati for “I am know all.”) He explained,

You are entering India, and you need to Indianize your MBA … at Wharton School, did they teach you about customs duties, excise duties, income tax, sales tax, Parliament?

Do you know about a zero-hour question, a call-attention motion, and the difference between a starred question and an unstarred question in the Indian Parliament?

If you don’t get to know all these things, let me assure you, all your formal education is not going to help you. You need your practical Indian MBA. And I am going to create that learning environment for you so that you can get the exposure.

A formal education doesn’t necessarily teach you everything about how to navigate the real world

Dhirubhai Ambani, the prototypical crony capitalist that he was, was highlighting the importance of learning the ways and means of doing business in pre-liberalization India.

One must note that Ambani’s extraordinary rags-to-riches story was a blend of cunning, street smartness, audacious risk-taking, and an unparalleled knack for bending the rules through powerful politicians and bureaucrats. As controversial as he was, Ambani must be understood in the socio-political context of India’s post-Independence industrial milieu. He artfully exploited the opportunities those times offered.

Idea for Impact: Formal education cannot complete the kind of real-world operative skills that you need

If you’re truly serious in your desire to get ahead in business, you will need a broader grasp of your chosen discipline than you can get from formal education.

Look, listen, learn. Every industry, company, organization, and team has its own culture. Spend time observing the winners: what does success look like? Who holds power, and how are they persuaded? What are the traits of people who get ahead? Emphasize developing skills in line with the winners.
Develop a network of people who can potentially lend a hand or bail you out of a jam. Invest in the people who will listen to your ideas and support your ambitions. Get to know peers at all levels to build a support base. Any person may have the knowledge and the allegiances that they can put to work for you if they’re so inclined.
Discover how to make the most of the circumstances you’re dealt with. Don’t manipulate others for your own devices in a Machiavellian sense—although, occasionally, you may need to use duplicity for respectable purposes, i.e. where certain ends can justify certain means.

Remember, the political payoff for fostering and nurturing relationships, and for developing a vast reservoir of skills and experiences, may take months, years, or even decades.

A Trick to Help you Praise At Least Three People Every Day

July 2, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Scott Adams, the American cartoonist who created Dilbert, writes in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big (2013),

Children are accustomed to a continual stream of criticisms and praise, but adults can go weeks without a compliment while enduring criticism both at work and at home. Adults are starved for a kind word. When you understand the power of honest praise (as opposed to bullshitting, flattery, and sucking up), you realize that withholding it borders on immoral. If you see something that impresses you, a decent respect to humanity insists you voice your praise.

Lavish Praise on People and They’ll Flourish

In his masterful self-help manual, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Dale Carnegie quotes the American steel magnate Charles M Schwab who was renowned for his people skills,

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people, the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. …

I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise. …

I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism.

Carnegie suggests, “Be lavish with praise, but only in a genuine way … remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it. But nobody wants insincerity. Nobody wants flattery.”

How to Praise No Less Than Three People Every Day

Here’s a simple, effective technique to unleash the power of praise and honest appreciation:

Start each day with three coins in your left pocket.
Transfer one coin to your right pocket each time you praise someone or remark about something favorably. See my previous article on how to recognize people in six easy steps.
Make sure that you have all the three coins in your right pocket by the end of the day, but don’t give compliments willy-nilly.

Avoid flattery and pretentiousness, especially when someone thinks that they truly don’t deserve the praise. As well, don’t undercut praise with criticism (as in a sandwich feedback.)

Idea for Impact: If you can’t be bothered with opportunities to elevate others’ day with a few simple words of appreciation, perhaps you’re just too insecure or emotional stingy. Even if praise is directed on others, it emphasizes your own good character—it shows you’re can go beyond self-absorption in the self-consumed society that we live in.

Don’t Use Personality Assessments to Sort the Talented from the Less Talented

October 25, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Personality assessments have featured in personality development and career counseling for almost a century. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and other tests form the basis for helping people deal with conflict, understand team interplay, outline career search, sharpen decision-making skills, and cope with stress.

Personality Assessments Cannot Predict Performance

Even as their use has grown significantly over the last two decades, personality assessments—including strengths inventories, and emotional intelligence assessments—have been criticized at length:

An individual’s personality cannot be summed up by a personality assessment. Individuality is described best by continuous (not discrete), normally-distributed attributes. For example, the MBTI Step I classification of individuals into 16 categories (or 4 dichotomies from Carl Jung‘s book Psychological Types (1921)) does not encapsulate the full range of personality variance.
An individual’s behavior cannot be limited to one side of a dichotomy. For instance, every person can be outgoing and assertive in the external world (extraversion,) while requiring time for some contemplation (introversion).
Many academic studies question the tests’ predictive validity and poor reliability. Moreover, personality assessments have poor test-retest consistency. Test takers have been shown to change at least one dichotomy when they take the MBTI Step I survey a second time.
Personality assessments can initiate confirmation bias (“Barnum Effect”)—the test scores are self-fulfilling because people tend to behave in ways that are predicted for them. In other words, a person who learns that he or she is “outgoing” according to MBTI may behave that way.
Personality tests are decidedly fakeable, especially when used to evaluate future career opportunities. All personality assessments are contingent on a degree of honesty, but MBTI test-takers are often motivated to match up to extraverted, sensing, thinking, and judging (ESTJ) proclivities in the modern organization.
Assessments are regularly offered as universally applicable. Not only do they tend to mirror the biases of the test developers, but also they are skewed in preference of the social groups the developer studied.

Personality Assessments are Starting Points for Change, Not a Predictor of the Outcome

Academics have long acknowledged the previously mentioned criticisms of personality assessments. They’ve argued fruitfully that many of the criticisms should be directed to how HR practitioners understand personality tests and use them in the development arena.

MBTI and many other personality assessments were never intended to sort the talented from the less talented. They are designed for the individual who takes the assessment, and not for the HR practitioner. In other words, personality assessments were designed to help individuals discover their underlying preferences regarding learning styles, problem-solving styles, self-awareness, ethical inclinations, emotional intelligence, and stress management.

Intended for Increasing Self-awareness, Not Appraisal

On the contrary, HR practitioners tend to interpret test scores speciously to gauge behavior, rather than as pointers of categorical preferences. Besides, HR practitioners often fail to factor in the test-takers’ past and current environmental influences.

And then there’s the risk of people being pigeonholed or pushed into a particular course regardless of his or her preferences. HR practitioners and career counsellors who put too much emphasis on personality assessments may compartmentalize people into rigid categories. This flies in the face of a central tenet of the MBTI premise—that individuals could choose to act against their preferred type if the occasion demands it. People’s attitudes and behaviors often change over time because of emotional experiences or socialization into specific work and social cultures.

Idea for Impact: Use Personality Assessments to Facilitate Self-Awareness, Not for Categorization or as Predictors of Achievement

If you’re a manager or a HR practitioner, don’t use personality assessments to categorize people or as predictors of achievement. Encourage people to take personality tests, but help them interpret these pieces of data about themselves—only they could make sense of test results in the context of their life history, social environment, and ambitions for career and life.

How to Buy a Small Business // Book Summary of Richard Ruback’s HBR Guide

June 26, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Beyond the capital markets and startups, I’ve been exploring buying a suitable small business to invest in and operate. To inform myself with the process of searching and valuing privately-held establishments, I recently perused Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff’s resourceful HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business: Think Big, Buy Small, Own Your Own Company (2017.)

The authors of this HBR Guide teach a popular Harvard Business School class on “acquisition entrepreneurship.” Their curriculum trains self-employment-inclined MBA students to search, negotiate, and buy an established business and become an entrepreneur-CEO within a year or two.

According to the authors, MBA students are drawn to their class by the prospect of a meaningful leadership responsibility earlier in their careers, as opposed to slowly climbing the corporate ladder or taking on the great risk of starting a company from scratch and establishing a viable business model.

The first section of the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business can help you decide if entrepreneurship is a good match to your temperament, lifestyle, work-experience, and career ambitions. The largest part of the book provides a comprehensive roadmap for all aspects of acquiring a business—bankrolling the search process, deal-sourcing, managing risk, organizing equity- and debt-financing, running due diligence processes, structuring the purchase, and closing the deal. The final section of the book discusses changing the leadership over and transitioning into operating management.

Reflection: Is Acquisition Entrepreneurship Right for You?

Self-employment is not for everyone. Entrepreneurs need to be smart, driven, business-savvy, self-motivated, strategic, resilient, persuasive, and be able to deal with uncertainty.
On top of the challenges of self-employment, acquiring and operating a small-business will require reaching out, projecting self-confidence, and persuading people you don’t know—business brokers, financiers, investors, regulators, sellers, employees, and customers.
During your exploration of what business to buy, you’ll have to quickly learn about unfamiliar industries, markets, and companies. As a leader, you must be able to develop cross-functional expertise quickly.

Searching: A Full-time Job in Itself

Plan to commit full-time for six months to two years to raise funds from financiers, identify and vet potential acquisition targets, and negotiate with sellers on a realistic purchase price. Afterward, plan for no less than three more months to perform due diligence and complete the transaction.
“When you are seeking out a business to buy, you might face months when you work 12 hours a day and simply not find a desirable prospect. It’s a frustrating experience with lots of effort and no reward.”
Arrange for debt and equity financing from potential backers and risk-sharing partners. Contact affluent folks in your network and investors who specialize in small-businesses. The networks of people you bring together to help your mission can also lend a hand during the deal making and the due diligence processes.
To find potential businesses to buy, try reaching out directly to businesses whose owners may be inclined to sell. Engage small business brokers (there’re some 3,000 small business brokers and intermediaries in North America,) or comb through databases of small businesses for sale.
For potential sellers, look for business owners who, after building their firms over the decades, are approaching retirement and don’t have an inheritor interested in running the business. Many aging business owners are determined to ensure that their businesses live on.

Seek Enduringly Profitable Businesses: Recurring Customers and Predictable Revenue

Look for “enduringly profitable businesses”—stable, slow-growth companies in dull-and-boring industries (such as sandblasting, equipment maintenance, industrial repair and overhaul, window-cleaning, service-providers) in small, defensible niche markets.
Seek businesses whose business-to-business customers are unlikely to switch vendors because the product or service their customers buy isn’t a big part of the costs of their business. Consequently, they’re not motivated to shop around for lower-cost vendors and squeeze margins.
Focus on businesses with yearly revenues of $5 million to $15 million and cash flows of $750,000 to $3 million.
Avoid promising start-ups and risky turnaround opportunities; “it is tempting to imagine buying a troubled business or one with uneven performance, because the purchase price would be very low. But we strongly advise against it, because you’ll have to reinvent the business model and doing so is a very difficult and risky endeavor. Instead, buy a profitable business with an established model for success—one that is profitable year after year.”
Avoid high-growth businesses because “high growth means that your new customers will quickly outnumber your existing ones. Because new customers bring new demands, there are many ways to get in trouble. New customers are, well, new; they have no loyalty to the company and no history. High growth requires great management effort. It also absorbs money rapidly, and raising that money puts a strain on the business and its owner. A rapidly growing firm also attracts competitors, which see the expanding market and the opportunity to attract new customers. So, in a high-growth business, you could work hard and still fail if you cannot keep pace with your competitors. And even if your business survives, you might find that competition has forced you to sell at low prices, so you enjoy little financial reward after all. Making this all the harder, the seller will demand a much higher price for a business that has the potential to grow quickly.”
Avoid technology-driven companies (they face shifting customer needs and therefore demand constant reinvention,) cyclical business, and businesses with well-established competitors.
Small business-owners usually don’t hire large consulting firms or investment banks to sell their businesses. Their businesses are too small to appeal to private equity firms. “We think it makes sense to buy a business with between $750,000 and $2.0 million in annual pretax profits. … At the upper end of our size range—$2 million or more in profitability—we find that institutional investors, like smaller private-equity firms, start to become interested and that competition raises the purchase price, reducing the financial benefits of owning the business.”
“EBITDA margin (EBITDA/revenue) ≥ 20% for services and manufacturing or 15% for distribution and wholesale”

A Checklist for Enduringly Profitable Businesses

Initial Filters:

Is the prospect consistently profitable?

Is it an established business instead of a startup or turnaround?

Is it in the right size range?

Is it located in a place you are willing to live?

Do you have the skills to manage it?

Does it fit your lifestyle?

Deeper Filters:

Is the prospect enduringly profitable?

Is the owner serious about selling the business?

Valuing the Company and Negotiating a Deal

Use the company’s past financial information to project future earnings and your return on investment. Then decide on how much you should pay for a small business: “You’ll need to base the offer price on the general range of 3x–5x EBITDA.” Adjust the multiple for profit margins and growth prospects.
Run a primary due diligence—“a focused period of rapid learning in preparation for making an offer. This is when you’ll test the seller’s initial claims and verify the information that has made the business appealing to you. … You’re looking for any reason that you might not want to acquire this business.”
Finance using equity and debt. “Visit banks and approach your investor network to raise money for the acquisition. You should be prepared to provide information about the business and its industry, details on the due diligence that you’ve done, your financial projections, and the deal terms that you are proposing.”
Once your offer has been accepted after negotiations, run a confirmatory due diligence “in which the company’s records will be fully open to you. You will typically have around 90 days to work with your accountant and attorney to check for any inconsistencies and red flags. … This can be an extremely nerve-racking time for both the buyer and the seller, so it’s important to be patient and calm.”

Transitioning into Leadership and Emphasizing Business-as-Usual

As part of the negotiated deal, try to get the seller to stick around for 3 to 6 months to help you in the transition.
“After closing the sale, you should focus on four tasks: introducing yourself to all your managers and employees, meeting with external stakeholders, communicating the transition plan to everyone, and taking control of your cash flow.”
“The most common trouble for small firms under new owners is running out of cash. … So set up a process whereby you approve all payments before they go out, and review your accounts-receivable balances at least weekly. You should also implement a 90-day rolling cash-flow forecast.”
Meet with all the constituencies and reassure them that they won’t see any immediate changes. Lay emphasis on “your overarching goals for the company—for example, excellent customer service, commitment to quality, a satisfying work environment—and encourage people to stay focused on their work.”
Visit every major customer as soon as you can. Keep your ears open for ideas to improve your product- and service-offerings.
Don’t make any big changes early on, get to know the business, and be very respectful of all the constituents—they know more about the business than you do.

Recommendation: Read ‘HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business’ for a Very Good Introduction on How to Buy and Organize Finance for a Business

Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff’s HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business is excellent manual for prospective entrepreneurs, employees of small businesses, financiers, and value-seeking investors. You will also become acquainted about interactions with bankers, brokers, sellers, accountants, and attorneys you meet while searching for a business to buy.

Books I Read in 2017 & Recommend

January 5, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Management & Leadership: Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management. Drucker’s conception for the organization as an integral part of society, his elucidation of the nature of managerial and leadership tasks, his emphasis on good governance, and his prescription for effective leadership have served managers well over the decades. The Practice of Management is one of those books that Drucker’s admirers tend to appreciate more with every successive reading. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours. A learning addict’s approach to learning new things to a good-enough level—but not to perfection. “In my experience, it takes around twenty hours of practice … to go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to do to performing noticeably well. … It doesn’t matter whether you want to learn a language write a novel, paint a portrait, start a business, or fly an airplane. If you invest as little as twenty hours in learning the basics of the skill, you’ll be surprised at how good you can become.” [Read my summary.]
Management: Leigh Branham’s The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. Discusses many ideas for employee “engagement practices” in great specificity to help managers and leaders keep their antennae up for signs of employees’ bitterness and discontent, and correct before they lose their best and brightest people. This practical volume can also help employees discuss and resolve their workplace needs and aspirations. [Read my summary.]
Influence & Leadership: Jeswald Salacuse’s Leading Leaders. “You need to take account of the interests of the persons you would lead. Leaders will follow you not because of your position or charisma, but because they consider it in their interest. Your job as a leader is to convince them that their interest lies with you.” [Read my summary.]
Education & Teaching: Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind. To enable the highest degrees of understanding, any skills instruction must be systematically reinforced by instruction in which the deployment of the skills makes holistic sense. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Habitually, your narratives and emotions dictating your actions. Frankl’s key message is that amid the various stimuli and responses, you have the freedom to choose your responses to any given set of circumstances. Frankl also introduces “logotherapy,” the psychotherapy system he conceived to help you uncover a sense of purpose in life and survive nearly anything. [Read my summary and my notes on Frankl’s exposition of the meaning of suffering.)
Biography & Entrepreneurship: Howard Schultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It. According to the ‘founder’ of Starbucks, Starbucks succeeded because the company offers more than just good coffee. The extraordinary growth of Starbucks derives from the corporate values he endorsed, viewing people as being more important than profits. The Starbucks marvel is not only about economic growth and brand success, but also about its socially conscious corporate ethos. [Read my summary.]
Biography & Leadership: Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! Beyond the tome’s gossipy narrative of Mayer’s management style, readers of this page-turner will be interested in Yahoo leadership’s strategic and tactical missteps. Particularly fascinating are how Yahoo missed opportunities to buy Google and Facebook when they were mere startups, the rebuffing of an acquisition bid from Microsoft, a lack of strategic focus, the leadership skirmishes with activist investors, the revolving door at the CEO’s office, and an Asian-asset drama. [Read my summary.]
Biography & Leadership: Donald Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure. Celebrated Coca-Cola executive Donald Keough offers a predictable, yet insightful—even if circuitous—exploration of ten (and a bonus) leadership mistakes. A worthwhile read for its many nuggets of business history, including his take on the infamous New Coke debacle. [Read my summary.]
Management & Leadership: Jeffrey K. Liker’s The Toyota Way. Toyota’s long-term standing as the epitome of quality production is undeniable. According to Liker, the genius of Toyota lies in how it has steadily institutionalized common-sense principles for waste reduction and continuous improvement. “Toyota is process oriented and consciously and deliberately invests long term in systems of people, technology and processes that work together to achieve high customer value.” [Read my summary.]

Also, my book recommendations from 2016, 2015, and 2014.

The four books I re-read every year are Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, Phil Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

You may be interested in my article on how to process that pile of books you can’t seem to finish and my article on why we read self-help books.

Wish you all very enlightening reads in 2018! Recall the words of the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

How to Prevent a Communications Breakdown During Crisis

November 13, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The ultimate test of a leader’s and an organization’s communication skills is how they deal with a crisis—natural disasters, crisis of confidence, acts of malevolence, strategic errors, acts of deception, management misconduct, and so forth.

It’s not difficult to see why communication is an important element of crisis management: leaders today have to tackle media that is unsympathetic to what it regards as management incompetence, shareholders and customers who are ever more demanding, legislation and regulation that is getting stricter, and competitors eager to pinch customers during times of distress.

Effective crisis communications must be able to have a consistent and clear message and present this message swiftly and regularly following a crisis.

Here are seven elements of effective crisis communication.

Strategic Thinking: Think purposefully about what you want your constituencies (employees, stockholders, customers, suppliers, communities, the media) to know under the given circumstances. Many a routine problem has transformed into a crisis because too many people were told too much and the situation became exaggerated and out of control.

What happened
Who is responsible
Why did it happen
Who is affected
What should be done
Whom can we trust
What should we say
Who should say it
How should we say it

Openness: When a crisis befalls, be prepared to talk about it internally and externally as assertively as you respond to the crisis operationally. Understand the expectations of your constituencies and go beyond what is expected or required. If you are not communicative enough, people may make erroneous assumptions about the crisis. Bad news can travel fast and sell best.
Candor: If your constituencies should know about a crisis that your organization is experiencing, talk about it as quickly and as completely as you can, especially to those most directly affected.
Concern: Keep the people most directly affected by the crisis updated until the crisis is completely resolved. Do not brand a whistle blower a troublemaker.
Sensitivity: At the earliest possible moment, step back and analyze the impact of the crisis. Inform and alert all the constituencies that are affected. Demonstrate concern, compassion, sympathy, remorse, or contrition, whatever the case may require.
Integrity: If you are responsible for the crisis or perceived as such, acknowledge the situation promptly. Be true to your corporate and personal conscience. Share the crisis action plan and seek inputs.
Honesty: Learn from your mistakes and talk openly about what you’ve learned. Demonstrate your commitment to keeping errors and problems from resurfacing.

Idea for Impact: Reputation and goodwill represent a great part of business value. Protect yourself when faced with attacks on your reputation and competence. If you do not communicate effectively and frequently with your constituents, somebody else will. In the absence of information, your constituents can develop their own perceptions of the problem and its implications.

Competency Modeling: How to Hire and Promote the Best

October 16, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Standardized tests, intelligence exams, and personality assessments have been in vogue for centuries for selecting job candidates and promoting employees. For instance,

In Plato’s Greece, civil service candidates were required to pass difficult physical and cognitive tests.
In China, the Han and Tang dynasties administered tests of literary style and the classics to hire the establishment bureaucrats. Aspirants were required to pass multiple three-day provincial exams and then take a final exam in the imperial capital.

Modern hiring practices have centered on the idea of competencies—specific behaviors, skills, knowledge, and pertinent experiences—identified for successful job performance.

Harvard psychologist David McClelland first proposed the idea of ‘competence’. In 1973, he introduced a then-revolutionary idea that transformed how companies hire and promote people. In his influential paper, titled “Testing for Competence Rather than for Intelligence,” McClelland made a case that a candidate’s GPA, IQ, or scores from intelligence or aptitude tests were not all as valid predictors of job success as was then imagined.

McClelland argued that another set of factors—“competences”—were better measures for explaining job success. To hire the best person for any job, McClelland recommended that organizations,

Begin by analyzing people who now have the job and people who held that job previously.
Classify the star performers—say the top 10%—by some logical and meaningful metric.
Compare the star performers to people who are merely average by a systematic method.
Identify the traits, characteristics, and behaviors in the star performers and not in the average performers.
Hire and promote people who have demonstrated the distinct traits and behaviors of the star performers.

Over the years, McClelland’s paper has evolved into “competency modeling,” a widespread methodology that is now at the heart of how many companies manage talent and achieve professional development for employees.

Not only are competencies often hard to define and understand, but testing for competencies through simulation or evidence is very difficult. Not to mention of how hard it is to assess employees quickly. Hence, at many “competency-driven” companies, human resources departments have dedicated teams to develop and implement competency models (see example from 3M, the Minnesota-based industrial and consumer products) to hire, train, evaluate, and promote employees.

Competency models form the baseline criteria for identifying high-potential employees, and succession management procedures.

How to Learn Anything Fast // Book Summary of Josh Kaufman’s ‘The First 20 Hours’

September 4, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Every Discipline, Hobby, or Sport Has Its Learning Curve

One of your core productivity principles should be to learn to do things to a good-enough level—but not to perfection.

In the pursuit of self-improvement, when you start to study a field, it seems like you have to learn hundreds of principles and skills. If you’re interested in no more than gaining an adequate amount of fluency in any skill, you have only to identify the crucial few core principles, learn them, and diligently practice them “in the trenches.”

According to self-described “learning addict” Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast, with a bit of strategy, you can learn just about any skill to a sufficient level with twenty hours of focused effort:

In my experience, it takes around twenty hours of practice … to go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to do to performing noticeably well. … It doesn’t matter whether you want to learn a language write a novel, paint a portrait, start a business, or fly an airplane. If you invest as little as twenty hours in learning the basics of the skill, you’ll be surprised at how good you can become.

Learning is Fun but it is also Dedicated Work

One of the real challenges for rapid skill acquisition, according to The First 20 Hours, is to get past the beginner’s blockade, which is the frustration that occurs when learning something new doesn’t come as naturally as you’d hoped for. The solution is to build in focused learning time into your daily routine.

Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere. Unfortunately, we tend to want to acquire new skills and keep doing many of the other activities we enjoy, like watching TV, playing video games, et cetera. “I’ll get around to it, when I find the time,” we say to ourselves. Here’s the truth: “finding” time is a myth. No one ever “finds” time for anything, in the sense of miraculously discovering some bank of extra time, like finding a twenty-dollar bill you accidentally left in your coat pocket. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.

The First 20 Hours tells you how to use the initial learning time to maximum effect and have as steep a learning curve as possible. To learn a skill, you must deconstruct the skill into its constituent subskills and learn enough about each subskill to be able to practice effectively and self-correct. For instance, Kaufman finds a shortcut to learning how to play the ukulele by memorizing the three chords needed for the majority of songs, which happen to be C, F, and G.

How to Learn Anything Faster

The first three rambling chapters of The First 20 Hours introduce many general principles of rapid skill acquisition and effective learning. The six succeeding chapters give Kaufman’s firsthand accounts of how he applied these principles to learn yoga, programming, touch-typing, a Chinese board game called Go, ukulele, and windsurfing. The chief takeaways from these chapters are,

Study, by itself, is never enough. If you want to get good at anything where real-life performance matters, you have to practice that skill in context.
Invest your limited time on the sub-skills with most payback and avoid those elements of the skill that are non-essential.
Create mental models and checklists for remembering the things you need to do each time you practice. It helps make the learning process more efficient.

Recommendation: Skim Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast. Start with the author’s TED video and then speed-read the first three chapters (39 pages) and the prologues. Read the subsequent six chapters only if the subject matter particular skills fascinate you—these monotonous chapters expose the many nuances of the trial and error in the course of learning.

How to Manage Smart, Powerful Leaders // Book Summary of Jeswald Salacuse’s ‘Leading Leaders’

August 22, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Most Valuable People are Often the Most Difficult to Manage

As you climb the career ladder, you will find yourself working increasingly with many other powerful leaders—both inside and outside your organization—who hold the key to your success. Often, you may share responsibility and control with a variety of leaders over whom you may lack authority and influence. Compared to others you’ve worked with in the past, many of these leaders will be more talented, ambitious, competitive, accomplished, assertive, controlling, and ego-centric.

According to by Jeswald W. Salacuse’s Leading Leaders (2005), driving change when you lack influence over other leaders requires you to tread carefully. You must employ all the diplomatic and tactical skills at your command. “Your ability to lead other leaders arises not just from your position, resources or charisma, but from your will and skill.”

The Only Way to Lead Leaders is to Do What is in Their Interests

Salacuse’s central idea in Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich, and Powerful People is that your success depends exclusively on your personal ability to negotiate shared and conflicting objectives, and subordinate your interests to theirs. “Move your followers to take action by characterizing a problem or challenge in such a way that it is in their interests to do something about it.”

To do this, you must determine the interests of those you wish to lead and then make it loud and clear to them that you are indeed serving their interests. This requires meticulous listening, reframing of your objectives in terms of their interests, and respecting their authority and autonomy.

Salacuse breaks the challenge down into “seven daily tasks,” each of which takes a chapter in Leading Leaders.

How to Direct and Negotiate the Vision: To negotiate a compelling vision for your organization that other leaders will buy into, decide on your direction for them and then have a strategic conversation on that subject. Lead an open discussion that allows for their enthusiastic participation. Do not impose your new vision from the top. Through a series of premeditated questions, pilot them to your conclusions. Such collaboration ensures that the leaders will own and support the decisions you select for them. Learn to identify those internally influential people relevant to your objectives and appeal to them. “Beware of becoming so intoxicated by your own vision that you fail to see clearly the reservations that members of your organization may have about pursuing that vision enthusiastically.”
How to Integrate and Make Stars a Team: Your job as the leader is to make sure that all the members of your organization understand that they have common values, shared history, and collective interests. Focus on communication. Demonstrate both by word and by deed that you put the interests of the organization above your own. Understand the nature of the cultural differences that may divide your organization’s leaders and then seek to find ways to bridge any gaps. “Deal directly with other leaders who are spoilers by converting them or isolating them.”
How to Mediate and Settle Leadership Conflicts: The more autonomous the other leaders are, the greater the odds of conflict over turf, power, style, and goals. A leader must intervene and mediate when other leaders come to disagreement. When conflicts arise, read between the lines. Observe the adversaries’ interactions, and find ways to improve communication. Look beyond the conflicting parties’ stated positions; probe for deeper interests. Work as a bridge, and find areas of agreement that can resolve the conflict. Consider how you could apply the six mediation power tools (incentives, coercion, expertise, legitimacy, reference, and coalition) most effectively to resolve conflicts. “A mediator, unlike an arbitrator or judge, has no power to impose a solution.”
How to Educate People Who Think They are Already Educated: Approach your teaching role tactfully. Leaders tend to be proud and sensitive—they may begrudge being treated as unqualified, unskilled, or inexperienced. Before you instruct them, make sure you understand their frame of reference. To the maximum extent possible, do your educating one-on-one, rather than in groups. Actively involve and invite their contributions. The command and control method of instructing them will be ineffective. Instead, use the Socratic Method—ask questions that encourage people to discover the truth for themselves. “In leading leaders, the most effective instrument is not an order but the right question.”
How to Motivate and Persuade Other Leaders: Learn as much as you can about other leaders—their backgrounds, interests, and their goals. Design the specific, personalized incentives that will accord with their interests—only individualized incentives persuade people to act in desired ways. Agree on future goals for the short term, medium term, and long term, and show how those goals relate to those of your organization. Be open and transparent with information so everyone knows where they are and where they are going. “Motivate your followers by envisioning a future that will benefit them and communicating that future to them in a convincing way.”
How to Represent Your Organization to the Outside World: As a leader, you are always on the stage. Everything you do will be subject to scrutiny. Your every action and statement, whether in public or in private, can affect your organization’s relationships with the outside world—customers, competitors, regulators, media, investors, and the public in general. Actively manage their perceptions and expectations. If those interests are dysfunctional or unworkable, seek to change or transform them through one-on-one diplomacy. “One of the most important functions that leadership representation serves is the acquisition of needed resources.”
How to Create Trust to Get the Most out of Your Leadership: People will trust you not because of your appeal, charm, or foresight, but because they’ve decided that aligning with your leadership will move their interests forward. Understand the people you lead and know their interests. Manage their expectations and deliver what you’ve promised. Reinforce your communications during problems and crises. Be consistent and predictable in your actions. “Openness is not just an easy smile or a charming manner; it refers to the process by which you make decisions that have implications for your followers’ interests.”

Tact and Diplomacy Matter More When Leading Other Powerful Leaders

Recommendation: Read Jeswald W. Salacuse’s Leading Leaders. This excellent book’s insights make a great template for the basics of executive leadership. You can especially learn how to gain persuasive skills in situations where you may not have much influence.

Beyond the academic pedantry (the author is a professor of law, diplomacy, and negotiation,) the abundant examples from political leadership are far more multifaceted than the narratives in Leading Leaders tend to imply, but they serve as good cases in point.

Leading Leaders offers a matchless resource in documenting what constitutes effective emotional leadership, which is, in spite of everything, all about persuasive power and influence to get things done through people. The key learning point is, “In developing your leadership strategies and tactics, you need to take account of the interests of the persons you would lead. Leading leaders is above all interest-based leadership. Leaders will follow you not because of your position or charisma but because they consider it in their interest. Your job as a leader is to convince them that their interests lie with you.”

« Previous Page