All articles written by John Howard, Ph.D., except where noted.

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Where Did All the Leaders Go?
From Jim Sirbasku’s Desk

The value of using a plan to accomplish an important task cannot be overstated. Builders need them, teachers need them, doctors need them. So do universities, hospitals, and nonprofit agencies. Even moms and dads need a plan, however informal it may be.

Given all the planning we see going on around us, it’s perplexing that some organizations don’t seem to think about succession plans for replacing key leaders until way past time to act. They act as if there is a perfect time and they will know it when they see it. And one day they look up, and anyone who could lead the company is gone. Key leaders get sick, die, retire, or depart for greener pastures. Changes are as inevitable in the CEO’s office as anywhere else, but people often ignore this fact of life because the prospect of replacing a key figure is overwhelming and/or makes us uncomfortable.

A recent article in Workforce Management mentions a survey in which 69 percent of companies in North America polled believe they will see a lack of top talent and only 6 percent feel confident they can make the right decisions for the future. This concern stretches across the globe. Organizations surveyed in other countries feel equally glum about the future of leadership.

This lack of attention promises dire consequences for an organization’s profitability, but let’s put that aside for a moment. The biggest challenge to an organization that fails to plan for the inevitable leadership brain drain is survival. A company that lets decades of experience walk out the door without a plan in place to stop the bleeding will bleed to death.

The story doesn’t have to unfold this way, despite impending baby boomer retirements and the changing nature of doing business. One of the essential truths of commerce is that the right people make things happen. If that sounds simple, it is. We just have to find the right people.

Here are some ideas that top companies are using to keep corporate knowledge from walking out the door.

1. Think about the key team member’s retirement years in advance of when it might occur. Have a conversation with this team member about the future. Ask her thoughts on who might be a replacement if she becomes sick or disabled for an extended period. This conversation can be an ongoing one, and does not have to be uncomfortable or threatening if we position it as a part of a purposeful business plan to ensure the company’s health.

2. Once you have a potential time frame in mind, set deadlines for each step: recruiting, training, transition. Some companies begin planning five to 10 years in advance of a leader’s retirement. Assessments can help by revealing interests, tendencies, skills and competencies.

3. Organizations sometimes appoint an intermediary to help recruit as well as conduct or participate in interviews – perhaps someone from the board of directors. This kind of third-party representation can aid in negotiations, asking and answering hard questions, and just taking the pressure off the potential replacement and the departing executive.

4. Talk vision early. The potential new executive has to share the organization’s vision, while not being afraid to try new things to move it forward. If possible, offer the incoming leader time to experience the company before he or she takes the reins – at retreats, trade fair booths and corporate meetings.

5. Build in a transition period that includes incoming and outgoing leaders sharing time. This period of imparting and absorbing company history and culture is vital to smooth change.

One of the most important things we can do before all the important team members disappear is to have in place plans to attract and retain talent. Although many top leaders come from outside the organization, competition for executive riches is intense. Our best bet is to grow our own, and to do it before we look up and wonder where everyone went.

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BOOK REVIEW: Getting in Touch with Our ‘Inner CEO’

When the CEO retires next year, what will the company do? When people know their leader is leaving, that question plays on the brain like a tune on a continuous loop. It’s a conundrum, experts acknowledge. One who has studied the situation offers an old solution with a tweak.

In a brand-new book, author and Harvard Business School Professor Joseph L. Bower says choose from within…but pick someone with an outsider point-ofview.

Why choose from the inside? One very good reason is that competition is intense for good leaders. In THE CORPORATION, Wesley B. Truitt notes that of the Fortune 1,000 companies, turnover of CEOs has sped up in recent years. For example, from 1999 to 2002, top executives departed at an average rate of 51 per year. But by 2003-2004, the number had jumped to an average 91 a year, a 56 percent increase.

Secondly, leaders who come from the outside don’t always have a great track record. Often they are hired precisely because of their unfamiliarity with the history and culture of an organization and their fresh perspective is treasured. But because they don’t know the background, they can bollix up the machinery. Then, poof! They are gone, and the revolving door ushers in another “new guy.”

In his November 2007 book, THE CEO WITHIN, Bower maintains that companies can avoid this scenario. This is not just opinion. With an academic’s precision, he interviewed leading CEOs and drew on his own experiences. His research for THE CEO WITHIN spread out over 10 years. He concludes that inside-outsiders -- leaders who know the company inside out but have the emotional distance to make objective decisions about the changes it needs -- are often the best choices to lead a company.

Bower explains how companies can develop a cohort of internal candidates, one of whom may be suited to the increasingly demanding CEO role. These potential leaders, who perhaps come from another division of the company, will view their role through the lens of someone who just bought the store and have a strong desire for it to succeed. Meanwhile, they are unencumbered by the baggage that comes from a long tenure in the organization. They also leverage the knowledge they've accumulated about the company's people, suppliers, customers, and future direction.

Positioned at the intersection of succession planning and leadership development, THE CEO WITHIN describes the distinguishing attributes of the insideoutsider and reveals how to recruit, nurture, and promote this leader. With a healthy supply of qualified internal candidates, companies get the leadership they need, when they need it.

Bower is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and chairs its corporate leader program. He is on the boards of several corporations.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
TEAM BUILDING: THE CEO WITHIN: How Inside Outsiders Are the Key to Succession Planning
Author: Joseph L. Bower
256 pages
ISBN 9781422104613
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press

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SUCCESS STORY: Putting a Hole in Turnover at Bruegger’s Bagels

EDITOR’S NOTE: Matt Riley, Director of Human Resources, believes in setting the example in using assessments. He reviews his own use of StepOneSurveyII™ and ProfileXT™.

Q. Why did Bruegger’s Bagels begin using Profiles assessments?
A. We wanted to be different from our competition and reverse turnover. Many in our industry believe high turnover in the Quick Casual restaurant market is a part of doing business. But the financial burden of turning over our general and assistant managers inhibited both our financial and team-building goals. Area managers and market directors found they were spending a large amount of time recruiting for vacant positions as well as supporting each of the bakery locations they managed by filling in for missing managers. Turnover also affected teams in every bakery and gave us fewer opportunities to build consistency and teamwork. The turnover at management levels contributed to higher rates of turnover in hourly positions. Higher turnover means less confidence in teamwork and consistency. This inconsistency affects every aspect of our operation, from sandwich makers to regional trainers to our vice president of operations.

Q. How did the company try to solve the problem before turning to Profiles?
A. We tried to hire candidates that were better suited to our concept. We also developed materials that we still utilize today to assist hiring managers in the basic steps of recruiting and hiring. These materials work adequately for sharing hiring skills and work very well when managers have the context of a specific candidate’s behaviors and match to a position. We decided to look for assistance from external tools that could give us information about the candidates and what our business and its culture demanded in the face of growth and organizational improvement. Bruegger’s had worked briefly with Profiles in 2002. At the time, we did not have the capacity to integrate it into our business well, so we set it aside until we could implement it with success.

Q. What assessments do you use?
A. We use the Step One Survey II and the ProfileXT. We use both of them for assistant and general managers. We use the PXT for candidates in our corporate offices. We use the SOS II after we receive a candidate’s resume and have a brief phone conversation to establish his or her interest in the company and the positions for which we are hiring. When we receive reports from the SOS II, we evaluate the candidate’s scores and if he meets our criteria for management positions, we conduct a follow-up interview using the report’s interview questions. Based on the candidate's desires and answers, we send them the PXT.

Q. How smoothly has the process worked for you?
A. We had a good initial experience with Profiles, so it was our first choice. We looked at other concepts that focused primarily on data collection, but they were not as reliable or valid as the SOS II or the PXT. We operate more than 150 bakeries in 14 markets, so we needed a solution that all of our markets would accept and that we could point to as a standard of excellence to all of our managers.

Q. What were the attributes you found most attractive?
A. Support from the Partner and Client Service Executive, education about the product, training on the product and its applications, reliability, validity, consistency in the quality of the interaction with all points of contact – all of which have been excellent with Profiles.

Q. What special training did you give managers?
A. Bruegger’s wrote a hiring process that we distributed to all hiring managers that established how we wanted to use the assessments and what our benchmarks are for job matches. Each hiring manager called our internal Profiles trainer to review each candidate’s reports to become familiar with how to read the reports. This was essential to having Bruegger’s culture embrace assessments as a positive tool for hiring and creating great teams as opposed to an elimination or exclusion tool. We call it “using the information for good and not for evil.” We emphasized that there are no wrong answers or people, just people who are better suited to Bruegger’s. Hiring managers who wanted to take the PXT were walked through their reports with our internal Profiles trainer.

Q. What results have you seen?
A. We have reduced management turnover in one year by nearly 10 percent. This is an estimated savings of $269,000. It's in our culture now to think about candidates in every department with different criteria. We have seen better understanding and interaction between workers. Hiring managers have improved at interviewing because they have more tools to use. Although they may have hired people for years, they may not have felt very confident in how they were interviewing and hiring.

Q. What are your plans for the future?
A. We want to continue to use these assessments and expand them to all of our corporate positions. We also want to re-evaluate our patterns and see how we can encourage the growth of the company by making changes in our job patterns. The next step is to continue giving the PXT to current managers and corporate employees and spend time with each of them on their individual results. This ties into Bruegger’s ability to create development plans for employees and help them succeed in their jobs.

Q. What advice would you give someone unfamiliar with assessments?
A. Establish why you want to use assessments. Learn about how they can work in a good trial that is well evaluated. When you decide to launch a program, be consistent about the explanation of why you are using assessments. There can be a lot of uncertainty and fear about “tests.” Commit to seeing it through. This doesn’t work nearly as well if it is not applied consistently. Create internal advocates for the use of assessments. Review your own use and continue learning about and improving your own awareness of your patterns.

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PRODUCT FOCUS: Step-by-Step Plans for a Successful Future

What if you had a wallet card that took you through a complicated process systematically, or a mentor who stands beside you and says, “Do this next”? Now, take that daydream a level higher. What if this handy mentor could help develop leadership qualities and provide a way to replace key team members when they depart?

We don’t have a wallet card or a mentor, but we do offer the next best thing. You can find a step-by-step guide to succession planning in The ProfileXT™ succession planning report, as well as in Profiles’ Checkpoint 360°™ tools.

Our clients use the Profile XT™ for employee placement, promotion, self-improvement, coaching, succession planning and job description development, and they say the PXT is three to five times more effective than any other assessment they have tried. In this newsletter, you can read how the PXT helped a financial services organization create a job match pattern that predicted top performers with astonishing accuracy.

But one of the most complex parts of enhancing performance is developing people who can lead the company, and the PXT delves into succession planning with same accuracy that our clients find in its other reports.

Think of the PXT’s Succession Planning Report as a sort of scientific crystal ball. The crystal ball part is obvious, but the scientific part allows team leaders to predict the future with accuracy. This unique report puts a person side by side with all of the jobs in the company and indicates the positions that his or her interests, skills and attributes match. A leader can take this information and help team members prepare for greater responsibilities by ensuring they acquire the skills and experiences they will need in order to perform well in the jobs they will fill in coming years.

Profiles’ Checkpoint 360°™ offers another set of leadership development tools. It starts by measuring 18 job skills that employees must have to work effectively. These include such traits as creative thinking, delegating, instilling trust, seeking improvement and adjusting to circumstances. Beyond that, its 360-degree feedback system gives managers a rating of their performance by a full circle of players: The boss, peers, and direct reports. The information coming out of this feedback helps them evaluate their strengths, areas for improvement, and overall job performance. This is the basis for planning and executing a program of professional growth.

An Organizational Management Analysis provides the organization with a description of where it is now, so that leaders know what direction to point the company in the future. This analysis helps push aside assumptions that can be false and lead to wasted time, effort, and resources. The OMA report, based on statistically accurate data, also provides an analysis of organizational development priorities and defines organizational training needs.

Another part of Profiles’ Checkpoint 360°™ is the SkillBuilder™ Series. This self-paced selfimprovement program provides managers with a series of important steps that lead to performance growth. This promotes professional development in all CheckPoint competencies.

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STRATEGIES FOR WINNING: Buried Treasure*

Who Knows What’s Hidden Right Under Your Nose?

In the 1970s, the Dallas Cowboys football team adopted the philosophy of drafting the best athletes they could find, some of whom did not have any college football experience. In the process, they found genuine talent that everyone else in the National Football League had overlooked. However, in the long run, the Cowboys decided it was more productive to focus on drafting football players who had already proven themselves on the football field.

We see that many businesses have designed their selection process in a similar manner: they almost always hire good people, but they make the mistake of placing some of these people in positions for which they are ill suited. Perhaps you’ve heard someone say, “He looked good in uniform, but he couldn’t play.” That’s a way of saying that an employee appeared to have all the attributes for success in a particular job, but didn’t perform up to expectations. Everyone has hired and promoted people who turned out to be disappointments. The number of times we have heard about top salespeople who became lousy sales managers is painful. That mistake occurs because neither the company nor the employee has a clear understanding of what it takes to become an outstanding sales manager. Oh, for sure, the company has a job description in a file somewhere that the sales manager could dust off and read if he or she wanted to, but traditional job descriptions are inadequate today.

A complete job description goes beyond listing the duties that go with a job title. A complete job description has to describe the attributes of the person who will perform the job in an extraordinary manner because he or she has the right brain power, the right behavioral traits, and the right occupational interests for the job.

A Personal Story from Bud Haney
We all subscribe to the idea that our people are among our greatest assets, recognizing that those organizations that stand head and shoulders above our peers and competitors in business tend to have superior people policies and, on the face of it, superior people. Accordingly, many of us spend a huge amount of time chasing the rainbow, at the end of which we know we’ll find a pot full of those perfect people that our industry leaders seem to have, instead of focusing upon identifying the best in those who already make up our teams. And therein lies the secret of those organizations with people-based competitive advantage – it’s not just that they identify and recruit great people (and, of course, that does help), but that they work with those people that they have to make them great, to find just what attributes they uniquely possess that can be developed and employed effectively within the organization, to build the sort of serious competitive advantage that only good people can confer.

Find the pattern in this series of numbers: 8, 11, 15, 5, 14, 1, 7, 6, 10, 13, 3, 12, 2 Take a moment to look it over, and then, if you’re stumped, go quickly to the bottom of this chapter for the answer. Then, read on.

So what? Well, the simple point is that sometimes looking at the familiar in an entirely different way can produce results that we scarcely expect. Your people are like that – you assume that because you’ve worked with them for a while, you know what they are, and what they’re capable of. That’s truly only up to a point. To uncover genuine hidden potential requires a shift in the way you evaluate your people. Take the following actions to get started.

Uncover Your Team’s Career Goals, Aspirations, Likes/Dislikes and Strengths/Weaknesses
You can’t begin this process without knowing a lot about each and every member of your team. Start by talking with them regularly. Find out what they like to do. Research published in a 1999 Harvard Business Review demonstrated that people excel at jobs that interest them deeply more than at jobs that their education, skills or experience might suggest fit them perfectly. Find out what your people enjoy doing, what career plans each has, and where they aspire to go in your business or in life in general. Don’t confine yourself to informal chats. Use more formal means like the Profiles Checkpoint 360°™ (see www.profilesinternational.com) and psychometric assessments like the ProfileXT™ to determine the particular strengths of your key assets.

The authors of the HBR research cited above put it perfectly: “…the best way to keep your stars is to know them better than they know themselves – and then use that information to customize the career of their dreams.”

Make Better Use of Strengths
When you have a good appreciation of the particular strengths of each member of your team, start to look for new ways in which to apply them. Brainstorm on how you can apply these strengths in new or imaginative ways to enhance the roles of each of your people and to address problems that you haven’t previously been able to address. In one successful example we observed recently in the IT industry, a talented project manager was put into the role of sales manager – not because she knew an awful lot about sales or had a gleaming sales record – quite the contrary – but because she was particularly good at organizing campaigns, marshalling resources, motivating her team to action, and seeing initiatives through to the end. Take off the blinders when it comes to applying strengths in new ways.

Turn Weaknesses into Strengths
In the movie Enemy of the State, Gene Hackman tells Will Smith, “…in guerrilla warfare you gotta turn your strengths into weaknesses…if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re fast and they’re slow… you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.” You’ve got to do the same with your people. Look at what you currently perceive as shortcomings, and then look at situations where those attributes could be positive. After all, most weaknesses are just overused strengths.

For example, a customer service representative who’s just too assertive to “put up and shut up” with angry customers may actually make a very successful salesperson, capable of overcoming objections not easily overcome by others. Consider the marketing executive who comes up with killer campaigns but just can’t seem to follow them through to the end. Focus that person solely on developing the creative campaigns, and assign project management and completion to someone better suited. Look at every shortcoming you currently perceive in your team members, determine where a weakness might become a strength, and figure out how you can capitalize upon it. You’ll be amazed at the results.

Feedback, Feedback, Feedback
In a recent study, 25 percent of employees said lack of feedback from management about their performance was one of the main reasons for changing jobs. Make it a formal objective to provide positive feedback on a job well done to every one of your people at least weekly. This requires you and your management team to actively seek opportunities to provide feedback. Not only does this increase the interest level in the job being done (we all like to be recognized), but it helps to reinforce positive behavior and performance at the expense of more negative alternatives. Also, experience shows that when you provide feedback to the team, they’ll provide feedback to you.

If you’ve been searching for a competitive advantage, then the answer may be just under your nose. Before you start exploring more exotic sources, look at the people who are driving your company right now. You’ll find untold treasure buried behind those familiar faces you see every day.

Pattern in the numbers? If you are familiar with numbers and numberseries puzzles, you are probably naturally inclined to calculate the mathematical relationship between 8 and 11, and then between 11 and 15, and so on until you can speculate as to the mathematical progression – and there is none! The numbers are arranged alphabetically!

Your people are so familiar to you, but if you look at them a little differently, you can learn an awful lot more about what can make them great for you and your organization.

(Thanks to Donna Engelson of Profiles National Capital for this teaser.)

*From the book 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved. Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint permission.

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CASE STUDY: ProfileXT™ Determines ‘Most Likely to Succeed’

Leaders of a financial services organization in the Southeast wanted to enhance the overall performance of their workers. With the help of ProfileXT™, they conducted a study to examine the relationship between employee performance and the PXT’s job match. This portion of the ProfileXT™ helps analyze a person’s jobrelated attributes and compares them to the qualities that person needs to perform well in a particular job. The result of this study: A customized job match pattern to help the financial services organization in the selection process.

Participants
The company selected 36 mortgage bankers to participate in the study. Leaders evaluated each participant’s performance by using a sales goal ratio and a supervisor’s performance rating. They used a simple ranking of one for Top Performers, two for Average Performer and three for Marginal Performer.

Eleven mortgage bankers attained the top rank, meeting 97.2 percent of their sales goals. Nine mortgage bankers reached an average level. Sixteen of the original 36, reaching 32.7 percent of their sales goal, attained the marginal level.

Job Match Pattern
In January 2006, using the scores of Top Performing employees and a concurrent study format, the organization chose the PXT to develop a pattern for the mortgage banker position. The pattern described the attributes of Top Performers and matched the 36 participating mortgage bankers to it. The PXT job match showed that an 87 percent benchmark best identified Top Performers. Company leaders then selected this number to represent a good match.

The numbers show that the pattern efficiently identifies top performers. It correctly identified seven of 11 as Top Performers and incorrectly identified four of 16 Bottom Performers as Top Performers. Furthermore, the pattern showed:

• Of the eleven Top Performers, seven met or exceeded the 87 percent job match.

• Of the combined 25 Average and Marginal Performers, only five met or exceeded the 87 percent job match.

• Those who met or exceeded the job match number achieved a 76.1 percent average sales goal ratio.

• Those who did not meet or exceed the job match benchmark attained a 48.9 percent average sales goal ratio.

Summary
Although the organization’s Top Performers made up less than a third of the total sample, seven met or exceeded the job match benchmark. That number was higher than the combined total (five) of Average and Marginal Performers who attained the same level.

By selecting candidates based on the overall match of the ProfileXT, this organization can increase employee productivity because it is identifying those most likely to succeed.

This pattern is now used as the benchmark to predict mortgage banker performance.

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