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Zenger Folkman Zenger Folkman the-extraordinary-leader July 14, 2016 No Comments
What Great Listeners Actually Doby Zenger Folkman
Chances are you think you’re a good listener. People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average. In our experience, most people think good listening comes down to doing three things: Not talking when others are speaking Letting others know you’re listening through facial expressions and verbal sounds (“Mmm-hmm”) Being able to repeat what others have said, practically word-for-word In fact, much management advice on listening suggests doing these very things – encouraging listeners to remain quiet, nod and “mm-hmm” encouragingly, and then repeat back to the talker something like, “So, let me make sure I understand. What you’re saying is…” However, recent research that we conducted suggests that these behaviors fall far short of describing good listening skills. We analyzed data describing the behavior of 3,492 participants in a development program designed to help managers become better coaches. As part of this program, their coaching skills were assessed by others in 360-degree assessments. We identified those who were perceived as being the most effective listeners (the top 5%). We then compared the best listeners to the average of all other people in the data set and identified the 20 items showing the largest significant difference. With those results in hand we identified the differences between great and average listeners and analyzed the data to determine what characteristics their colleagues identified as the behaviors that made them outstanding listeners. We found some surprising conclusions, along with some qualities we expected to hear. Continued on Harvard Business Review.
February 17, 2016 1 Comment
Are You Technical Enough? Here’s How It Affects Your Leadership Skillsby Jack Zenger
Fifty years ago management theorists had an expansive view of the role of general managers. The mantra was, “A manager is a manager and they can manage anything.” They believed a good general manager could move from managing a retail shoe company to functioning as the general manager in a precision auto parts manufacturing company. Management skills are infinitely portable, correct? The GM didn’t need to possess a deep understanding of the business. Business schools focused on teaching management and the discipline rose to be revered. Notable business leaders like Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld moved from industry into government, bringing along their relentless focus on analytics. This fueled the belief still further that general managers could run organizations effectively based solely on their management skills, including moving from the private sector to the public sector. All this was based on the assumption that a general manager could rely on others to have the deep knowledge of the technology underlying their firm. Occasionally I continue to see organizations appoint leaders who don’t have depth or expertise in the particular functions they run. The rationale is that in addition to relying on subordinates for necessary technical knowledge, throwing them in the deep end of the pool will require them to quickly learn the necessary expertise they require. But what’s different in organizations today than 50 years ago? Things have gotten substantially more complex. Technology evolves rapidly. Product life cycles diminish. Change escalates exponentially. Can a leader with low levels of technical or financial acumen in a particular business be successful today? To answer that question my colleague Joe Folkman and I looked at a dataset of more than 57,000 leaders and measured their technical and financial acumen. We then examined how they were perceived as leaders in general. We were particularly interested in the impact of acumen on top managers. Many people continue to believe that the senior leaders in an organization don’t really need technical depth or knowledge. But the graph below demonstrates that leaders both in general and top managers who were at the bottom 10% in the technical and financial acumen were rated at only the 12th percentile in their overall leadership effectiveness. Leaders in the top 10% were rated at the 84th and 80th percentile respectively. Continued on Forbes.com.
September 18, 2015 1 Comment
Infographic: The 6 Leadership Leversby Zenger Folkman Discover the six leadership behaviors that distinguish extraordinary leaders from all others! Leaders have a dramatic impact on the productivity of those they lead and on the organization’s bottom-line results. Zenger Folkman’s research discovered six key behaviors that extraordinary leaders leverage to influence others and improve their organizations. Watch our complimentary webinar or download the infographic to discover the six leadership levers and how to select the right leadership skills for development. Watch Webinar Download Infographic
September 9, 2015 No Comments
Tell, Ask, Listen: The 3 Steps To Great Communication As A Leaderby Joe Folkman
In my research on what defines a great leader I’ve found that the ability to communicate powerfully and prolifically is an essential skill for success. However, most people assume this skill primarily involves talking. A leader can use words to motivate or sway people to act. But true communication involves much more than one person speaking powerfully. As author George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” When people think about improving their communication skills, their knee-jerk solution is to talk to people more often, send more messages and provide more information. In other words, they believe the solution to better communication is to do more telling. While it is true that telling is an important aspect of communication, great leaders have learned what good marriage partners understand well: when your spouse says, “We need to talk,” they typically do not want you to do the majority of the talking. In addition to speaking fluently and frequently, the most effective communicators are equally good at asking the right questions and listening. To understand the impact of these three skills (telling, asking, and listening), we look at data from 2,867 leaders who were assessed by their managers, peers, direct reports and others on their effectiveness at communicating powerfully, asking effective questions, and listening well. We wanted to understand which skill, by itself, would have the greatest impact on a leader’s perception as an extraordinary leader (e.g., at the top 10% of leaders overall). Continued on Forbes.com.
March 6, 2015 No Comments
New Research: To Reach Full Work Potential, Hone In On Your Strengthsby Jack Zenger
I first learned of author and researcher Michelle McQuaid a year ago, when she famously determined in a study of 1,000 American executives that 65% would rather have a better boss than a raise. As a fellow researcher of strengths based development McQuaid’s newest endeavor, the 2015 Strengths@Work Survey with the VIA Institute on character, caught my attention as well. Inspired by various findings on how much more engaged employees become when managers recognize and appreciate their strengths, McQuaid initiated a new study. In a nutshell, yet again, the evidence shows profoundly that recognizing and honing in on a person’s greatest strengths is far more effective than grinding in on their greatest weakness (unless, of course, the weakness is a fatal flaw.) Continued on Forbes.com.
January 15, 2015 1 Comment
Great Leaders Can Double Profits, Research Showsby Jack Zenger
To some extent, the connection between leadership and the bottom line has been made. Yet most evidence on this point comes merely from the personal treatises of famous and successful executives. While interesting, the variety of opinions we hear on leadership’s role in profit creation are incomplete and even contradictory. As a result, my colleague Joe Folkman and I have gathered research that supports the bold claim that leaders, good and bad, directly affect the bottom line of the organization First we analyzed a substantial database of some 500,000 feedback instruments (commonly called 360-degree feedback reports) that pertain to approximately 50,000 managers. Our premise was simply that if you want to find out the effectiveness of a leader, ask the opinions of those who are led. Through a study of these reports commissioned by a division of a Fortune 500 commercial bank, we discovered compelling evidence of the dramatic effect of leadership effectiveness on net income. Fortunately, this was an organization in which the profit analysis was relatively easy. In this case we were able to isolate many of the external factors that exist for most of its leaders, clearly revealing the significant impact leadership had on its bottom line. ... Continued on Forbes.com.
September 11, 2014 No Comments
Want To Become A Great Leader? Here’s The Keyby Joe Folkman
By now many people are aware that as a leader, merely fixing your weaknesses will not make you great. However, for some the message has not quite taken hold. So today I am sharing some research that should give you pause when you’re tempted to focus on your faults instead of building upon what’s going right. A few years ago, several groups of executives went through our company’s program, The Extraordinary Leader, at a large bank. A few months later we asked them to participate in a follow-up survey. We found that 88% of the participants indicated they were focused on building strengths. We then compared the responses of those focused on building strengths to those who were fixing weakness and found some interesting results. ... Continued on Forbes.com.
July 30, 2014 No Comments
The Skills Leaders Need at Every Levelby Joe Folkman hbr
A few weeks ago, we were asked to analyze a competency model for leadership development that a client had created. Its was based on the idea that at different points in their development, potential leaders need to focus on excelling at different skills. For example, in their model they proposed that a lower level manager should focus on driving for results while top executives should focus on developing a strategic perspective. Intuitively, this makes sense, based as it is on the assumption that once people develop a skill, they will continue to exercise it. But, interestingly, we don’t apply it in athletics; athletes continue to practice and develop the same skills throughout their careers. And as we thought about the excellent senior executives we have met, we observed that they are, in fact, all very focused on delivering results, and many of the best lower level managers are absolutely clear about strategy and vision. This got us to wondering: Are some skills less important for leaders at certain levels of the organization? Or is there a set of skills fundamental to every level? To see, we compiled a dataset in which we asked 332,860 bosses, peers, and subordinates what skills have the greatest impact on a leader’s success in the position the respondents currently hold. Each respondent selected the top four competencies out of a list of 16 that we provided. We then compared the results for managers at different levels. ...Continued on Harvard Business Review.
March 27, 2013 No Comments
The 9 Things Bad Leaders Who Successfully Improve Learn To Doby zengerfolkman Originally posted on Forbes on March 22, 2013 In a Harvard Business Review Blog Bad Leaders Can Change Their Spots, Joe Folkman and I describe a group of 71 poor leaders who succeeded in getting much better. Specifically, they improved their effectiveness scores, on the average from 23% to 56%. They didn’t necessarily become rock stars. But these are people who moved the needle from bona fide poor
leadership to “good leader” standing to a degree that they’d doubled their scores. How did they do it? While many readers have been impressed it could happen, many more have been skeptical that it could happen at all. Admittedly, not every leader has the ability to do better. But all 71 of these individuals (a full 75% of our group of “bad leaders”) successfully accomplished this shift... continued on Forbes.
September 27, 2012
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Update on Zenger Folkman’s New Book “How to Be Exceptional”by zengerfolkman
As I said to Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman in last week’s Strengths-Based Leadership Development webcast (click on title to view the archived session). How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths (click on title to read my review) really is an exceptional book. In my 35 plus years of studying, applying, writing about, and providing leadership development programs and services I’ve never seen such powerful data leading to a clear path for developing leaders. This book will become a landmark in the leadership development field. It provides the succinct, practical, how-to roadmap we so badly need to navigate the inspiring and tremendously fulfilling territory of strengths-based leadership. Last week Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe & Mail, published a full length review of How to Be Exceptional that concluded with, “It’s a clear, easy-to-read book, despite the heavy focus on research, and a compelling alternative approach to our tendency to obsess over weaknesses.” As I outlined in Leadership Lessons from Evidence-Based Medicine, that heavy focus on research is exactly what’s so badly missing from the confusing world of leadership theories, models, and approaches. And most of them have no basis in any research at all. Zenger Folkman has succeeded in writing an easy-to-read and very practical book that’s based on evidence. You can read the full review at Excellent? Counterintuitive tips on how to be exceptional. Here are other reviews, excerpts, and links for How to Be Exceptional: “A fitting capstone to Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman’s previous works, the new book provides readers with organizational gold. “It brings forth data … to illustrate what happens to teams and organizations when we uplift and grow their participants, and when we truly strengthen executives’ abilities to lead.” - David K. Williams, CEO of Fishbowl “The best book on professional development I have read in decades. It reinforces the emerging wisdom that the path to greatness is really about building profound strengths, rather than through relentlessly focusing on one’s weaknesses. This is a great road map for any leader seeking to optimize their growth and impact.” - Michael A. Peel, Yale University, Vice President, Human Resources and Administration “Zenger Folkman’s findings related to companion behaviors is exciting. It enhances what’s been presented in prior books and makes extraordinary leadership seem like an achievable goal. I would recommend this book to anyone committed to the journey.” - Pam Mabry, Director, Human Resources, The Boeing Company “A milestone in the emerging business case for evidence-based management. Building on two decades of earlier research, the authors brilliantly lay out a simple, concrete, scientifically validated model for achieving consistently superior business results through leadership … Its magic is its simplicity, pragmatism, and focus.” - Eric Severson, Senior Vice President, Talent, Gap Inc. Read the rest of this post by Jim Clemmer on http://bit.ly/SauXue Next »
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