Leadership Reality

A great deal of leadership development is like trying to teach a bull to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the bull. So this is the NO BULL zone.

Your source for reality and research checked information.

Peace on Earth

It’s a relief to be away from the Holiday Hype in the States. It’s a relief to be away from the political campaigning and the vagaries of the minute by minute market news. It’s considerably less stressful to be in Islamabad without the 24/7 news than it is to be back in the supposedly safer USA.

The best leadership learning in that example is:

Leaders, let your staff unplug over the holidays and lead by example. Put your crackberry away, don’t email, phone, text, tweet, or otherwise annoy people while they are on holiday. Make it your gift to everyone and call it “Peace on Earth.”

Leadership Speaker - Clare Novak

Leadership Speaker - Clare Novak

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Upcoming Conferences

EBIT-Duh!tm is coming to a conference near you. I'm delighted to be presenting at a number of SHRM Chapter and State Conferences in October, including Pittsburgh, Greater Valley Forge Summit, and Garden State where I will also have a "book" signing. CDs of EBIT-Duh!tm Finance for the HR Professional will be available.

At the Lehigh Valley Conference, finance focuses in on calculating ROI for Wellness programs.

Looking forward to seeing SHRM friends!

Leadership: The Best Behaviors

The best leadership models share a few critical leadership behaviors. This short list was attained at first through observation, then social science research and now neuroscience. The data is in!

Leadership Best Behaviors:

• Model behaviors
• Model emotions
• Praise progress continuously
• Focus on goals relentlessly
• Guide people to their own answers

Mean People Earn More?

An American Management Association study made the news today, a rare occurance. The sound bite said that mean people earn 13 percent more than nice people. Of course, the headline did not give any detail.

Before we all jump to conclusions, a great question to ask is "How did they define mean and nice in the study?" Without knowing exactly how that question is answered, we have no way of knowing what the data really mean.

This is but one example of how we should take the time to dig into the data before taking action in our organizations. Popular versions of most research leave out crucial information such as the circumstances under which something is true, the exact definition of what was studied and an explanation of whether the data is correlational or causal.

In other words, don't start being mean just to get a raise.

Hard and Soft Leadership

The sweet spot for HR and Training Leaders is Soft Leadership, the human side of the equation. While HR Leaders are frequently in the business of finding coaches for their business leaders, it's rare to find an HR Leader with a coach. Why?

Most coaches are Soft Leadership coaches and what HR Leaders need is a Hard Leadership coach--a coach bringing finance and processes knowledge. To remedy that gap we'll soon be offering finance and business process coaching for HR Leaders.

Make the business case first!

Business Case First

Imagine you’re sitting at the table and kicking off the meeting. “Our revenues per employee dropped from $280,000 to $230,000 the last year. My proposal adds 1 million in revenues to the bottom line and drives business goals.” Got everyone’s attention, didn’t you? Financial literacy is your ticket to a reserved seat at the table. CEO’s don’t lose sleep over engagement, wellness, or EEOC policies. They lose sleep worrying about whether the company is making enough money to stay in business, whether loans rates will go up because earnings plummeted and over just how badly the competition is eating everyone’s lunch.

Savvy leaders understand that the CEO’s first job is to keep the business in business. Yes, the initiatives we propose do help keep the business in business and the CEO still has every right to ask “So, how are we going to pay for that?” Smart leaders establish the business case first then ask for what they want. Understanding revenue, margin, balance sheets, and income statements is a start. The next step is linking financial data to business imperatives: revenue growth, margin, asset effectiveness and operational excellence.

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EBITSeminar

EBITSeminar

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EBIT-Duh! Finance for the HR Professional

EBIT-Duh! Finance for the HR Professional

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Tactical and Strategic

Recently an HR volunteer leaders’ voice was drowned in a chorus of objections. He noted that at an upcoming conference it would be interesting to have a presentation that explored current research and discussed the theory behind the research trends. The chorus that drowned him out was, “Our attendees want practical information; things they can immediately use.” National and International conferences echo that exact tactical focus in their RFPs.

While tactical information is certainly important, excluding long term trends, emerging theories and research is short sighted. Let’s say you have a first grader. If you take a tactical view of her future career, you might encourage her to be an electrician, plumber or healthcare worker as there is a global shortage of those careers now. The strategic view is to look at projections and ask, what careers will there be too few people to fill 20 years from now? And by the way, what languages will be required of her to get that job? Preparing her for a specific career might not be the best choice. Perhaps teaching her how to learn quickly, think critically and network effectively is the way to go.

My belief is that professional organizations insisting on 100% tactical presentations at meetings and conference are doing members a disservice. When we don’t look down the road at information, we are likely to be blindsided by changes. The information is out there; we just need to look up and see it—before it becomes tactical. Looking further down the road allows us to be proactive. Waiting for information to become tactical trends toward being reactive.