Issue No. 546 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a nettlesome question from Dick Daniels: “Does development develop?” Hardwiring New Leadership Habits is a must-read! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), and click here for over 500 book reviews. And click here to listen in on “The Next Chapter With Charlie Podcast” as Charlie Hedges interviews me this week about mistake-making.
Dick Daniels notes that your team likely includes three groups: Expectation Exceeders, Expectation Meeters, and Expectation Missers. So…are you good with the status quo, or is it time to hardwire new leadership habits?
No Way!
Been there. Done that.
You’re a fly-on-the-wall at Global Organization Resources Inc.’s annual senior team three-day offsite retreat. Everyone’s prepared. Planning for the next year, the 10 leaders have thoughtful ideas on GOR’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Then it happened! On Day 2, “Synthesis Day,” the CFO, Wilson, threw a monkey wrench onto the agenda. Wham! (And he’s “usually the quiet one in the corner who’s looking over his spreadsheets.”) His big beef? GOR was spending way too much on developing their people.
And no surprise, Wilson had his facts and figures. “It’s the warm, fuzzy expenditures that make us feel better…” he said. But the people development budget was three times more than what their two largest competitors spend annually.
The team's response at the CFO's disruption? “I was shocked. We were shocked. Say what?” And with that testy opening, Dick Daniels treats leaders and readers to a master class in leadership—at all levels—with this nettlesome question, “Does Development Develop?” (OK—geniuses! Prove that one to your number-crunching CFO.) Good News! The answers are in this book:
Does Development Develop?
by Dick Daniels
“No way,” I thought. When Dick Daniels alerted me to his new book, I tilted toward skepticism. “What more could he possibly write about?” Daniels is a stunning thinker and writer—and his previous books are so comprehensive that I named both as my books-of-the-year in 2015 and 2021. So…hasn’t he already said it all in two books?
• Leadership Briefs: Shaping Organizational Culture to Stretch Leadership Capacity (2015 Book-of-the-Year: read my review)
• Leadership Core: Character, Competence, Capacity (Leadership Multipliers) - (2021 Book-of-the-Year: read my review)
No way! (Er, um…way!)
Hardwiring New Leadership Habits: Does Development Develop? is jam-packed with ready-to-use action steps and insights—coupled with a memorable metaphor: how to connect three “wires” to hardwire new leadership habits. The book is short and crisp and brings a holistic clarity to that pesky question: does development develop?
How much does your organization spend (or invest) in people development? Dick Daniels writes, “The motivation in developing team members is either proactive or reactive. Companies spend money proactively to move the needle from good to great in specific aspects of one’s leadership.”
“The other approach is a reactive investment to address problem areas or deficiencies in one’s leadership approach. Our assumption is that leadership represents learned competencies. Great leaders never stop growing, so they never stop learning and applying what they learn.”
And this warning: “Sometimes the reactive initiative is a last attempt to help a team member before deciding whether to retrain, reassign, or release and replace them.” He agrees with Lisa Lang, in her ATD article, “Enter the Learning Zone,” who writes:
to sustain a career. Learning must be embedded into employees’ daily lives at work to facilitate lifelong learning.”
Just 170 pages, the take-aways in this hot-off-the-press book are remarkable:
• The matrix contrasting No Organizational Investment vs. Organizational Investment (horizontal) and Organizational Value vs. No Organizational Value (vertical). The no/no quadrant: “Leads to Organizational Atrophy.”
• Why the leadership development mission must address all levels: supervisors, managers, and leaders.
• What happens when there is an absence of “a succession planning leadership pipeline from the company’s talent pool”—and why the development vision is so critical.
ALERT! “One of the toughest leadership transitions is the move from operational leader to strategic leader,” writes Daniels. He notes the “seven seismic shifts” that must occur per the HBR article, “How Managers Become Leaders,” by Michael D. Watkins. Example: “Bricklayer to Architect.” Click here to read the article or click here to order HBR's 10 Must Reads for New Managers (with bonus article “How Managers Become Leaders”). Serendipitously, Watkins’ book, The First 90 Days, happened to be in the rotation today for the second book review below (Book #17 of 100).
THERE’S MORE!
• The Character and Competence matrix:
--High Character/Low Competence: “I like you but I don’t respect you.”
--High Character/High Competence: “The Leadership Capacity Multiplier”
--Low Character/Low Competence: “Your days are limited here.”
--Low Character/High Competence: “I respect you but I don’t like you.”
• “The New Nine Box Grid”—perhaps the most important five-page chapter on leadership ever written. (Honest!) Chapter 3, “Hardwire Connection #3,” describes three groups: Expectation Exceeders, Expectation Meeters, and Expectation Missers. How are you currently addressing those with Low Potential and Low Performance? And…how are you inspiring and retaining those with High Potential and High Performance? I’d buy this book just for this chapter.
• Stunning questions that enrich clarity:
--10 Culture Questions (#3: “What are the spoken and unspoken rules, and does anyone get a pass?”)
--“The Stay Interview” from SHRM (read more)
--Personal Reflection Tool: a 21-day exercise, with your coach, for self-assessment at the end of each day.
--10 Organizational Diagnosis Questions (scale of 1 to 10): How valued is development in your organization? Example: “Just hire someone soon” vs. “We have a leadership pipeline.”
--The Johari Window Model: Do you know anyone in the “Known to Others” and “Not Known to Self” quadrant? That’s the “Blind Spot.”
Bottom Line: If you’re a senior leader—and you think you don’t need this book, you may have a blind spot. And speaking of blind spots (read this), bestselling author Marshall Goldsmith endorsed Dick Daniels’ book and called it “Powerful!” I agree.
Does development develop? How would your team—and your CFO—answer this pesky question?
And by the way, I was wrong. Dick Daniels does have a lot more to write about—and I have a lot more to learn. So will Hardwiring New Leadership Habits be my 2023 Book-of-the-Year? No way! (But…I’ve been wrong before.)
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Hardwiring New Leadership Habits: Does Development Develop? by Dick Daniels. (Click here to read a two-page article by Daniels in TD Magazine.)
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In Chapter 8, “Hardwire Connection #8: Avoid Tripping the Ten Circuit Breakers,” Dick Daniels warns about “circuit breakers” that can dismantle a people development culture. He writes, “Among the three levels of a development culture, leading yourself is always harder than leading the team or even leading the organization.” He quotes Lee Iacocca: “The speed of the boss is the speed of the team.” Do you agree or disagree—why?
2) Daniels includes 15 antonyms for hardwired: “unplanned, accidental, acquired, artificial, careless, disorder, external, flexible, foreign, incidental, negligent, slack, spontaneous, superficial, and thoughtless.” Oh, my! Would any of these words apply to the development culture in our organization?
Mastering 100 Must-Read Books - Part 2: Books-of-the-Year
Book #17 of 100:
The First 90 Days
For your team meeting this week, inspire a team member to lead your “10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning” session by spotlighting Book #17 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books.
The First 90 Days:
Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
by Michael D. Watkins
Books #6 through #21 spotlight 16 books that I named the Book-of-the-Year from 2006 to 2020. The author of The First 90 Days uses a helpful acronym, “STARS,” that describes four transitions: Start-up, Turn-Around, Realignment, and Sustaining Success. Warning! A successful CEO of a Turn-Around may fail at a Realignment.
• Read my review.
• Order from Amazon: The First 90 Days
• Listen on Libro (6 hours, 58 minutes)
• Download the 100 Must-Read Books list (from John and Jason Pearson)
The “STARS” theme oozes through all the chapters. The author gives examples across all sizes of organizations, including an astounding example from Coca-Cola. Warning leaders than no one is immune from the perils of transition, he discusses the CEO stint of Douglas Ivester, promoted to Coke’s CEO in 1997, after serving three years as president and COO.
“But Ivester was unable to make the leap from COO to CEO. He refused to name a new COO, even when strongly pressed to do so by Coke’s board of directors. Instead, he continued to act as a ‘superCOO’ and maintained daily contact with the sixteen people who reported to him. His extraordinary attention to detail which had been such a virtue in finance and operations, proved to be a hindrance in his new position. Ivester could not free himself from day-to-day operations enough to take on the strategic, visionary, and statesmanlike roles of an effective CEO.”
The Wall Street Journal even piled on. (Read my review.)
Charlie Hedges interviews John on The Next Chapter Podcast
Mastering Mistake-Making (Part 1 of 2)" is the topic on this week's podcast of The Next Chapter With Charlie Hedges. LOL! Charlie labels John a "Master of Mistake-Making" in this 35-minute interview on the book John and Jason Pearson wrote in 2021. Charlie started podcasting before most of us could even spell the word. This is Episode 268. Listen here or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
More on the book here.
PEARPOD | TELLING YOUR STORY. How robust is your leadership succession pipeline for your communications and marketing teams? Are you attentive to retaining great people and addressing under-performing people? We can help you enrich your pipeline with creative approaches. (Every role does not require exactly 40 hours of work per week!) Contact Jason Pearson at Pearpod (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
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