Your company may be suffering from a genuine talent shortage. It may be suffering from a flawed hiring process. It may be one or the other or even both, but the end result will be the same: Companies that can’t find creative ways to find the employees they need can’t grow.
Despite perpetual complaints about never having enough time in the day to do crucial work, many executives waste precious hours doing jobs that an executive assistant (EA) could do better, and for a fraction of the cost. Leaders who don’t delegate such tasks visibly show everyone around them they aren’t focused on leading. That erodes morale rapidly, especially when a company is in crisis. It also slows down executive career advancements.
In 2011, Jeffrey Glazer was handed a rare opportunity: the chance to once again lead the company he had founded 26 years earlier. Like a parent whose wayward adult child moves back home, Glazer saw things he didn’t like.
Glazer decided he had to alter the culture fast, and he did so by rebuilding his senior leadership team, promoting talent inside the organization, putting his new team in charge of several dozen big accounts, and not expecting mindsets to change overnight.
Building leadership teams is most successful as a team sport. High-performance leadership teams don’t necessarily materialize after highly talented executives are recruited, and they don’t necessarily evolve as team members get to know one another. Instead, a great top team is designed, recruited, fine-tuned and upgraded.
Want to Upgrade Your Business? Upgrade Your Leadership Team!
A maturing industry requires its leaders to act differently. As industry players grow larger to manage compliance burdens and to gain access to capital, leadership styles that worked in the past can become dysfunctional.
Nearly every midsized company talks about the need to build a strong bench of internal candidates for the top management team. I agree: nothing is better than home-grown talent. However, sometimes a candidate isn’t ready to be promoted and the company simply cannot wait. In those cases, recruiting is the only option but that alternative can be rife with risk.
Too many managers and leaders spend all their time and effort using what they already know to help their company. That sounds like a good thing, and it is in the short term. The problem is that soon the company grows, and needs new ideas and solutions. The manager who has not anticipated this and has not grown their own knowledge base is less able to help their company. That’s bad for the company and bad for their career. This article gives specific, practical steps for any manager or executive to put themselves on a self-guided learning program.
Become a pro at firing executives. You won’t brag about it at parties, but your company will be stronger and wealthier for it!
Finding great leaders to join your company is required. Keeping the dysfunctional ones will kill your growth.
Video journalist and instructor Aron Ranen reports that he’s seen a significant rise in the use of video for internal corporate communications. He’s involved with projects for large and midsized companies from brick manufacturing to steel fabricators to bus assemblers, all converting written training and communications to video.
Robert Sher is founding principal of CEO to CEO, a consulting firm of former chief executives that improves the leadership infrastructure of midsized companies seeking to accelerate their performance. He was chief executive of Bentley Publishing Group from 1984 to 2006 and steered the firm to become a leading player in its industry (decorative art publishing).