Archive for March, 2011
A Senior Executive Shares His Leadership Rules of the Road March 7 2011 no responses
One of the most popular aspects of my company’s group coaching program, Next Level Leadership™ for high potential leaders is the senior executive guest speakers who come in for a lunch time “what I’ve learned” conversation. They talk about what they’ve learned over the course of their career and what they’ve had to pick up and let go of as they’ve taken on bigger jobs.
We recently hosted an executive who’s responsible for about a billion dollars of annual revenue in his company. He had some very solid and practical rules of the road about what it takes to be a successful senior leader.
Here are four of his leadership rules of the road:
The Big Reasons New Executives Fail and What To Do About Them March 4 2011 3 responses
If you've been around organizations for any length of time, you don't need a research study to tell you that newly hired or promoted executives often struggle in their new roles. You've likely seen it with your own eyes. A recent survey of 320 executives and talent management professionals conducted by the Alexcel Group and the Institute of Executive Development does a great job of explaining what makes executive transitions so difficult and what can be done to ease the path.
The big headline from the study is that over 20 percent of internal promotions and 30 percent of external executive hires are deemed failures within two years. The big reason they fail? More than 75 percent of the participants in the study cited poor interpersonal skills such as relationship building, influencing others and communications. When paired with the second big reason for failure, the challenges of navigating complicated organizational systems and processes, a picture begins to emerge. Newly hired or promoted executives need help in getting up to speed quickly.
The top three things that help the most, according to the study respondents, are mentoring or informal buddy programs, a customized "good start" plan for the executive and working with a coach who understands the organization. The March issue of Next Level Thinking will include access to the full executive summary of the Alexcel Group/Institute for Executive Development study. You can click here to subscribe.
In the meantime, what trends are you seeing around new executive success and failure? When they succeed why do they? Why do you think they fail? What is your organization doing to help them succeed?
How to Get a Quick Win March 2 2011 no responses
As the author of The Next Level
You’ve got to be careful out there, though. Going after the quick win doesn’t mean putting yourself in the position to be a hero. If you do that, all you’ll do is tick people off. Mark Van Buren and Todd Safferstone do a nice job of cataloging some behaviors to avoid in their Harvard Business Review article, The Quick Wins Paradox.
So, it’s good to have a list of what not to do when you’re searching for a quick win, but what should you do? Based on a decade of coaching leaders who need to get off to a strong start, here’s a short list of what I’ve see that works when you’re in search of a quick win:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
Recent Comments