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Responsibility is one of the four cornerposts that Total Executive formulate our Total Exec Views upon. So recently, we have been scouring the web for articles about responsible leadership - also known as ethical leadership.
We have also set up a page on responsible leadership. You can view it here
You can also now view a collection of articles about responsible leadership here
And view the Responsible Leadership website created and sponsored by Total Executive here
A couple ways to provide responsible leadership solutions is through adaptive leadership and social innovation.
View articles about adaptive leadership here
View articles about social innovation here
The articles below will provide some background viewing and reading prior to our forthcoming online conference and fundraiser on Responsible Leadership in November 2010...
Attendance of the public conference is free with attendants encouraged to support their preferred charities, not for profit organisations and community projects.
The online conferenceand associated documentation will also be recorded for international digital distribution. All comments will also be recorded and a summary of comment surveyed will be published.
Learn more about Responsible Leadership 2010 and how you can be involved here
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Enjoy the articles below and then you decide - when should responsible or ethical leadership begin (I believe the earlier the better - as mirrored by some of these articles)...
Then - with this understanding of Responsible Leadership we anticipate you will determine its considerable value when considering how to maximise performance, productivity and profit within your business...
Read the article here
Bob is also Chairman and MC of Responsible Leadership 2010
Adaptive Leadership and the Need for Reflection - Lindley Edwards - GMD - AFG Venture Group
Download the article here
What is Business Sustainability?
Responsible Leadership for Performance: A Theoretical Model and Hypotheses
Responsible Leadership in the 21st Century - Tom Osborne - Dickinson State University North Dakota
What you do today will be forgotten within 10 years.
So what's important is to have quality values and following them.
Think long term - think about what you need to do to lead a responsible life - so you may overcome adversity and live a valuable life
Paul Hunter, Director of Corporate Learning Network - introducing the concept of Responsible Leadership and the speakers to follow
Here is a video about corporate social responsibility and responsible leadership coming from the director of an executive coaching organisation - interesting outlook and introduction to the videos that follow...
Responsible Leadership: A Personal Perspective - Mary Robinson - Former President of Ireland & Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Responsible leadership is a theme of a number of videos that follow
Mary Robinson is former President of Ireland & Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
Leading academics along with political and business leaders from around the world took part in a Responsible Leadership Summit at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland where the Summit's participants and speakers were asked how they think responsible leadership will shape the future of business and society.Responsible Business Leadership for a Sustainable Future - Wendy Luhabe - Chair of the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa...
Here is a video about responsible leadership that also ties in with sustainability.
The content starts about 1 minute into it after an intro song.
Coming from Africa, responsible leadership has a lot of implications and opportunities for such a economically poor continent
Responsible Leadership in Emerging Markets - Raji Pawar - Chairman NIIT
Are emerging markets where we need responsible leadership the most?
Professor Georges Haour's view on Responsible Leadership
Professor Haour has thoughts on responsible leadership that incorporate technology, innovation and management of people
Responsible Leadership. Change for Good - Peter Bakker - TNT
TNT have taken a variety of steps toward responsible leadership. This video outlines a few of the points undertaken
Responsible Leadership in Times of Uncertainty - Georges Kohlrieser
This interview gives a lot of points on the importance of responsible leadership.
It is relevant in times of uncertainty and relevant now...
How Consumers are leveraging post crisis
This shows how consumers were a big part of the crisis problem.
Though now consumers are starting to leverage themselves - increasing savings and being more careful about how they invest.
This has large implications for marketers and people in sales.
This has a big impact as consumers move from mindless consumption to mindful consumption. To lead these consumers to your business 4 value shifts need to be considered as shown in this video.
Marketers and sales executives as well as those involved in leadership of staff will find this interesting and important to understand the patterns and adjust business models accordingly - it is a time to innovate to achieve results...
Of particular interest is the move to quality and fair play
Sales performance - using sustainable futures
Here is a story about the business logic of sustainability that includes ideas of which many executives leading sales teams who want to make friends with customers and the earth can learn from...
Social Innovation - How Stanford are seeing a growth of interest by students in how to 'Do Good' whilst 'Doing Well'
INSEAD Social Innovation Centre - A very interesting interview following the INSEAD Leadership Summit
Organisational Ethics
Ethics is a system or code of moral standards of a particular person, group or profession. The operative word is 'system'. A 'system' can be a set of facts, principles or rules arranged in an orderly form.
When we make a decision we balance competing priorities, values and perceived obligations in order to make something better than it was. We can make things better by improving something good, making something less bad or reducing uncertainty.
A good decision may not be seen by all as being good. However, we can at least be seen to be providing ethical leadership if we are able to:
- Take into account the multiple perspectives held about a decision
- Be fully transparent about the perspectives, the decision and the outcome
- Make the decision against a set of principles or values we aspire to meet
To illustrate, consider this scenario:
Yesterday, you read in the local newspaper that an employee in your staff had been convicted of failing to pay income tax on private earnings. The employee, who had filed false income tax returns in each of the past five years, holds a senior position. The total tax, which had been avoided, amounted to $5,000.
The employee was ordered to pay the amount, together with interest, and the costs of the proceedings. He was also fined $5,000. You have more or less daily contact with the employee who also has frequent contact with prospective and past customers. You had not been aware of the matter.
Earlier today, you interviewed an applicant for a Supervisor's position. The applicant holds a university degree and is studying for the Diploma in a field relevant to your industry. You judged the applicant to be mature, to be likely to get on well with people, and to be well qualified for the post.
During the interview, the applicant spoke openly about his conviction, as an eighteen-year-old, some 10 years ago, for an offence of robbery and about the four years that he had spent in prison. During his time in prison, he had begun to study. Over the years he had gained a high school certificate and graduate qualifications. Since his release, he had worked at several different entry level jobs in your industry as his applications for 'better jobs' had been unsuccessful so far.
One of his very positive references is from a tutor. The other is from an employer who reports on how conscientious and hard working he was as an employee in two different roles.
If this was your organisation, what impact should the tax conviction have on the employee's suitability for continued employment; what account would you take of the conviction, say, in an appraisal?
What weight would you give to the applicant's conviction for robbery?
If I now asked you to compare your two answers what general rules or principles does this indicate applies to your ethics?
What if the employee was being investigated for $200,000 tax fraud? Does the amount of money make a difference? What if the employee had authority over company financial transactions?
What if the applicant was convicted of aggravated burglary? What if the applicant was convicted of rape?
What do your answers say about your or your organisation's system of moral standards, about fairness versus maintaining a low risk environment for employees and the organisation?
Would the answers of other people in your organisation be different? If so, what does that mean for an aggregated view of your organisation's ethics?
Questions of ethics can be difficult as has been demonstrated. At an organisational level it is wise to implement formal processes and procedures that give clarity to what is ethical and what is unethical behaviour. It is also wise to give examples and provide people training in what is ethical in your organisation. Your ethical framework should cover elements such as recruitement, marketing and sales, intellectual property, performance management and internal succession planning.
Having ethical standards and processes to manage and evaluate organisational behaviour against those standards, however, is not enough.
The American Society for Quality Control identified five managerial mistakes which ultimately damage the integrity of an organisation:
- Favouring the company's interests over the interests of its stakeholders.
- Rewarding behaviour that violates ethical standards.
- Creating a corporate environment that encourages separate standards of behaviour at work and at home.
- Allowing individuals to abuse power to further their own interests.
- Creating managerial values that undermine integrity
The culture of the organisation and its leaders with regard to ethics plays a pivotal role in maintaining organisational ethics.
To illustrate the importance of leadership with regard to organisational ethics and leave you with a final thought on ethics, I will finish with a short article by by Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE.
If you aren't honest with the rest of the world, how can you hope to be honest with yourself? Honesty isn't what you say you believe, it's what you model, encourage, reward and let happen every day.
Come with me for a moment to Oklahoma. One of my friends, proud father Bobby Lewis, was taking his two little boys to play miniature golf. "It's three bucks for you," the attendant drawled, "and three bucks for any kid who's older than six. They get in free if they're six or younger."
Bobby said, "Well, Mikey's three and Jimmy's seven, so I owe you $6.00." The attendant looked surprised. "Hey mister, do you like throwing your money away? You could have told me the big one was only six and saved three bucks. I wouldn't have known the difference."
"Yes," Bobby said, "but the kids would have known the difference."
Daring to take responsibility for your own life requires truthfulness and honesty in all your dealings, both with yourself and with others. As an individual or a company, what you do in private is as important as what you do in public.
Source:
©2009 Change Factory
Executive Mentoring
The day to day pressures on senior and middle management are increasing in line with the accelerating rate of technological change and market globalisation. Mentoring, closely aligned to coaching, is a method of providing managers with an oppportunity to improve their performance and their lifestyle.
Issues
Today’s managers have higher qualifications as a basic entry requirement. They have a shorter time to learn how reality differs from the text book example. Some of the key factors resulting in higher day to day pressure on operating management include:- Steeper learning curve
- Complexity of operating circumstances
- Shorter customer response times
- Increasing competition
- People management issues
- Leadership demands
- Increased demands on managers’ already scarce time
Executive Mentoring
- Ability to put problems or opportunities to an objective, experienced manager.
- Discussions can be behind closed doors.
- The mentor will provide possible solutions based upon knowledge and experience in a mentor role.
- Advice given by the management coach will be objective.
- The line manager can make the final decision and then implement it.
- Management coaching can be used to whatever extent the line manager feels necessary.
- This is a cost effective support solution.
Brian Birley, Managing Director, P.A.C.E. Corporation Pty Ltd; Canterbury, Victoria; Ph: (03) 9888 6549 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (03) 9888 6549 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
First published: 18 September 2000.
Last updated: 6 October 2005.
Coaching Skills: Team Coaching, Performance Coaching, and Good Leadership Skills
Coaching Skills are an essential part of Good Leadership Skills. In a global economy, a company's people can be their greatest asset and taking the time to focus on employee mentoring and employee development will reap great benefits.
Below you will find helpful resources targeted to team coaching for people managers, leaders, sales managers and coaches. This content is not targeted to a specific industry but focuses on building good leadership skills and strong coaching skills that are transferable into any environment or organization. The fact that you are here, looking to expand your coaching skills and improve your team through performance coaching, employee mentoring, and employee development, is the first step to achieving a beneficial work environment that sees constant performance improvement and healthy employee morale.
Vist some of our recent articles and keep checking back as we share new tools often.
Coaching Skills
Coaching to Quality
Quality coaching discussions can be some of the most difficult to have. Let's explore how to approach these performance coaching sessions to acheive the behavior change you need.
Motivational Chain of Events
When your teams and employees are asked to deliver, they do not always have the motivation to accomplish the goal. Team coaching is simplified when the chain of events that they go through is understood and used to motivate them to perform.
Team Coaching
Investing Wisely in Coaching
Managing your coaching time and applying your coaching skills like you would your investments provides a more strategic approach to acheive a measured return on your investment.
Performance Coaching
Quality Performance Opportunity Coaching Strategy
Performance coaching is essential and having a strategy to approach team development is key. Using QPO, you can focus on coaching the right employees to acheive the greatest team performance improvement.
Coaching One on One
People need individual coaching. Do your employees get regular and consistent time with you, focused on their development? Let's look at how to leverage one on one performance coaching for individual gains.
Good Leadership Skills
Characteristics of a Leader
We all know what a leader looks like as we've seen it in other people, but do we all know why they're such great leaders? They all share certain characteristics that determine good leadership skills.
Emotional Intelligence
Do you know what your EQ is? Emotional Intelligence is a factor that sets good leaders apart from great leaders. Let's explore what this concept means and how to apply it with the people and teams you manage.
Additional information on the subjects above is available below...
Coaching Quality - Having an Effective Coaching Feedback Sessions
Why are these coaching feedback sessions so difficult and even adversarial? There are many reasons that coaching quality can be difficult ranging from, employee compensation being tied to a quality assurance rating or survey results, to a human’s inability to accept re-directive feedback. In any case, the manager can at minimum create an environment where coaching quality is seen as a good thing by focusing on these key points.
- Define what a good job looks like
- Provide Training
- Measuring Success
- Feedback loop
The first step in ensuring you produce a quality product or provide a quality service is to define what you expect. Do you think it’s a fluke that all sweaters are folded the same way and at the same size on the sweater display? Are you amazed when your hair cut looks exactly like the one in the magazine? Or when it doesn’t? Setting standards or expectations for performance are key in achieving your desired outcome.
You can communicate the standards all day long, but if the employee doesn’t know how to do the job, it doesn’t matter. Some jobs require training and others simply need to be communicated. In any event, let the employee know what a good job looks like. When coaching quality if possible, always give the employee a visual of what the end result should be. This can be in the form of peers as examples, training, final products, or by watching you.
Measuring success is crucial when coaching quality because this will be your leading indicator on how to measure quality and ultimately how to coach. It is a common misconception that measuring success must be numerical in nature. When coaching quality the quantitative measure is certainly the easiest approach to measuring success, using measurements such as units completed and dollars sold or survey results indicated. Non-numerical and qualitative measures can be used as well. They may look like adherence to a call flow, selling a value proposition, the tone of an interaction or willingness to take ownership. For the coaching feedback sessions you want to focus on the behaviors that are driving the measures. What are they specifically doing or not doing that needs to change or that you want them to continue doing? This will ensure that measuring success can be done in a way that is always relevant to the job the employee is performing.
Once the success behaviors have been articulated, it’s time to begin coaching quality around the job done. This feedback loop is imperative for employee development. Without employee development, the business will not grow and flourish as it could. Many operations and businesses stagnate and never reach their full potential because the manager/coach does not conduct coaching feedback sessions that are a necessity in driving employee productivity and performance.
So, how does the manager focus on coaching quality while keeping their employees engaged and accepting the feedback? Set-up the coaching feedback sessions in a non-confrontational way, such as utilizing the IGROW Model. You may have the employee audit their own work prior to your coaching feedback sessions. If that’s not possible at a minimum let them know ahead of time what you will be discussing. Ask them to come prepared to assess their performance in the specific area you wish to discuss. The format of the coaching feedback sessions should always follow a standard flow.
- Ask the employee to tell you what they did or are doing well. Do not let them go immediately to their opportunities or things that were not completed to standards. It is important to learn from the things they have done correctly and to point out what they are completing successfully.
Notice as you are coaching quality you are not discussing a quality number or survey metric. Your coaching should be behavioral in nature. Do not coach a number. Be granular and talk about behaviors. Behaviors Drive Results.
- The manager/coach should then provide positive feedback. You may have identified behaviors the employee did not. If you identified the behaviors the employee already discussed, that’s okay. Reinforce those.
- Next, have the employee identify and articulate the behaviors they did not exhibit to meet the standards. Ask them to be specific. You want the employee to take ownership and be accountable for their own actions.
- The manager/coach should then provide their feedback based on observation or data. Again, be specific and behavioral.
- Now that you have identified what they are doing well (meeting quality expectations) and what they can do better (to meet quality expectations), move to the coaching on how they will change their behaviors to meet quality guidelines.
- Since the employee has identified the gap in performance, this may only require follow-up on the coach’s part to ensure they have changed their behavior consistently over time.
- If the behavior identified requires skill development, the coach should walk the employee through Development Action Plan writing.
- Leave coaching feedback sessions letting the employee know you believe they will successfully make a change in behavior and that you will follow-up with them on their progress.
Motivational Chain of Events: Understanding Employee Motivation and Their Will to Perform
As we previously discussed in the Hi \ Lo Matrix, employee motivation is present to differing degrees in our teams and is dictated by varying things. While you may understand where your employee falls on the Hi / Lo Matrix, do you know why their level of commitment is low and thereby their will to perform? Understanding what drives their behaviors can help guide your coaching interactions to ensure you are focusing on the right things with each and every person on your team. This is where understanding the Motivational Chain of Events can assist you in determining what drives employee motivation and their will to perform.
The Motivational Chain of Events is based on the idea that there are several factors to analyze when attempting to determine the root cause of an employee's lack of motivation or will. Each of these factors are linked together by the performance management process.
Let's take a look at this chain and how the pieces link together.
- Effort / Resources
- Result / Product
- Reward / Consequence
- Employee Motivation
The links in the Motivational Chain of Events 
The Effort / Resources link in the Motivational Chain of Events depicts the amount of energy both the employee and the company or organization put into a particular task. The company provides the resources to employees to enable them to perform. This can come in the form of training, software, hardware, supplies, or additional people to support their efforts. The employee must also make the decision on how much effort they are going to invest in the task. This level of effort is the first link in determining the picture of employee motivation. Together the employee and the company dictate the start of the performance journey in this way.
The Result / Product link in the Motivational Chain of Events is used to show the outcome of the effort and resources invested into a particular task. Depending on the investment in the earlier piece of the chain, a product, level of performance, or result will occur. In other words, given that the company has supported the employee with the resources needed and the employee has decided to dedicate the right level of effort, or will to perform, high performance or a quality product will result.
In the Reward / Consequence portion of the Motivational Chain of Events, we tie in the overall reward or consequence that the employee can expect from performing the task well. The reward can manifest itself in the form of recognition, monetary incentives, or eligibility for new challenges. On the other hand, there are also consequences for poor performance or low quality work. If the employee does not deliver, they should understand there will be consequences. This can come in the form of loss of incentive income, poor performance ratings, lower appraisal ratings, and negative recognition.
The last link in the Motivational Chain of Events, Employee Motivation, is a result of how the employee felt while experiencing the previous links in the performance process. These links produce a level of motivation in the employee, whether high or low, that they carry forward to their next tasks.
If you think about it, each time you, your employees, or your teams set out to accomplish a goal, they progress through this Motivational Chain of Events. Now that we understand the process, how do we apply it? Well, we must understand the breakpoints that can occur, to understand what could be impacting or limiting the employee motivation we see and their will to perform and to deliver the expected results.
How and Where do Breaks in the Motivational Chain of Events Occur? 
The first breakpoint can occur in between the Effort / Resources and Result / Product links. This breakpoint in the Motivational Chain of Events is often due to a lack of confidence. Essentially the employee does not necessarily believe that they can deliver the results that are expected of them. This confidence level can be based on either their view of their own skill sets or their view of the level of resources provided by the company.
To ensure that the employee has the confidence to deliver, you must first ensure there are adequate resources provided. While some aspects of the resources may be out of your control, you can often make up for deficiencies provided by the company in added manager support. Next you must truly believe the employee can deliver and ensure they see this come across from you. If the employee senses that you have a low amount of confidence this will impact their confidence level and the overall results they deliver as their will to perform will be lower.
The second breakpoint in employee motivation can occur due to a lack of trust. This break will typically occur between the Result / Product and Reward / Consequence chain links. In this break, the employee does not trust that the outcome of their efforts will be what was communicated. In other words, if they successfully complete the task and meet the performance expectations, they should see a reward of some type. If they do not believe this reward will occur, they will not have enough trust to motivate them to perform. Think about how de-motivating it is to deliver your best product, but to have no one notice the effort you put in. Doesn't it almost encourage you to spend less time and effort on your next task?
To overcome this breakpoint in the Motivational Chain of Events, you must reinforce the reward or consequences consistently. Each time your employees or teams deliver at or above expectations you must recognize it in some manner. Likewise, if they fail to deliver, you cannot let this go unnoticed or unchallenged.
The last breakpoint can occur between the Reward / Consequence and the Employee Motivation chain links. If the employee has a lack of satisfaction when delivering results and receiving their reward, again their employee motivation will be lessened. Let's take an example. Let's say that the reward put in place for delivering high performance is to receive a new challenge potentially at a higher standard. If you have an employee who has no interest in new levels of work, they will be less than motivated to achieve a higher level of performance. This can also occur because the employee believes that they did not receive the support that was necessary from you or the company and therefore had to expend more energy than may have been necessary.
To ensure your employees and teams avoid experiencing a lack of satisfaction, you must determine what their hot buttons are. If you are trying to motivate an employee with a higher bonus for delivering above expectations, but the employee places a higher value on receiving recognition, you have misplaced your efforts and will not see a change in their will to perform. You could not only receive higher performance if the reward matches the employees desires, but could also save unnecessary expenses.
Now that you understand the breakpoints in the Motivational Chain of Events and how to address them, it's time to practice what you've learned. To do so, you should analyze each member of your team and their level of employee motivation, using the Hi / Lo Matrix and then determine where their breakpoints might be. Once you have done so, you are ready to coach. You can then use the IGROW Model to apply what you've learned and to begin to see a performance change through heightened motivation.
Investing Wisely in Performance Coaching: Where to Spend Your Coaching Time
Investing wisely in performance coaching can help us as managers, focus our coaching time. Let's face it, we have our focused pulled in many different directions each and every day. To ensure we use our coaching time wisely, we must ask the question who do we coach and how much time do we spend with each? While, most will answer, we should spend time performance coaching all of our employees equally, as it seems only fair, taking a more strategic approach to performance coaching and managing it as we would an investment, will reap much higher rewards.
There is often a mantra used in employee development, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That is often how we approach our high performers and top sales reps. As we discussed in the article Sales Managers Must Coach, a highly effective coach can increase top performers results by up to 20%. To accomplish this type of performance improvement we must view performance coaching as an investment of coaching time where we are looking to reach the greatest return on our investment.
Performance Coaching as an Investment
So with limited time how does the busy manager allocate time for coaching? We typically allocate the same amount of coaching time per employee, it seems only fair. Sometimes we spend more coaching time with the low performers in hopes of helping them become medium performers. Let’s think of your time as money. Would you invest your money evenly across 5 different investments that received different returns? No, you want to maximize your investment while mitigating some of the risk. To do so, you determine what percent to allocate to each investment based on your risk tolerance.
How to spread your coaching time should be looked at in a similar fashion minus the risk tolerance. In the Hi / Lo Matrix we ranked employees on a scale with axis of Will and Skill. For our Coaching Time Investment Model, used often in a sales environment, let’s have axis of Performance and Potential. Stars Performers are high performance and high potential. We love these folks. Solid Performers are high performance and low potential. They tend to carry the load. Under Achievers are high potential and low performance. Often times, we don’t understand why they don't perform better since they have the ability to do so. In the last category are Poor Performers. They are low performance and low potential and are often the most draining on our time and patience. Knowing where your employees fall will help you determine what you coach and how much time you spend performance coaching.
Where's the best Return on Your Performance Coaching Investment?
Where do you get the most return for every coaching minute? No, it’s not the poor performers. Since they are also low potential, you don’t want to put your money in that basket as your return on investment will be low in the best case scenario. The next logical place to spend your time would be with the solid performers. How many of us do that? Well, notice they are already high performers with low potential so time spent there delivers approximately the same results you see today. So where do we allocate our coaching time and therefore coaching dollars?
The Time Investment Coaching Model shows that under achievers and stars are where you want to spend the majority of your time. They are high potential and therefore net you more. Coaching time spent with the under achievers garners you the most incremental increase in performance for your coaching dollar. They have the ability but have not yet realized the performance they have the opportunity to achieve.
What about the Star Performers? What more can you get from them? On average an effective coach can help add another 10% or more in performance from their star performers. The additional benefit is increased job satisfaction and retention. Also, don't forget you may well be coaching your next manager.
Allocating your Performance Coaching Time Investment
What is the right amount of time to allocate to performance coaching? Since your time, and in particular your coaching time, is a limited commodity you must apply it where you will see the best results. As we've discussed, coaches often have a backwards logic to their performance coaching allocation, so rather than falling into this trap, a good rule of thumb to use is distributing your time strategically across the groups of performers. By allocating 20% to the poor and solid performers, 50-60% to the under achievers and 20-30% to the stars, you will begin to see a larger overall improvement in your team's performance.
Also keep in mind that you must achieve a balance in your overall time dedication to performance coaching. Sales and Operations research has shown that 3-5 hours per month is optimal for performance coaching. Spending too much more coaching time than that and you can be seen as too in the face of the employee and can actually hinder their performance. So, an hour a week is all it takes to increase performance in your Core and drive increased results. In another article we will review When, How and What we coach since this will differ for each group
Quality Performance Opportunity Coaching Strategy Achieves Performance Improvement
There are a number of ways to apply a coaching strategy to coaching your team. Some managers choose to focu
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