If you’re interested in dramatically boosting personal, team, or organization leadership and coaching skills there’s an incredibly rare opportunity you’ll want to seize this summer. And you could combine this powerful Leadership Summit with vacation and leisure time in picturesque Park City — one of Utah’s top tourist destinations favoured by entertainment stars during Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival.

For little more than the cost of our one day public workshop you have an extremely unique and unusual chance to immerse yourself for three days:

• Hear from — and chat with — two of the leading international authorities in leadership — and especially the revolutionary new field of Strengths-Based Leadership: Joe Folkman (renowned psychometrician) and Jack Zenger (HRD Hall of Fame and Lifetime Achievement Award from American Society of Training and Development).
• Hear a presentation on “How to Create a Coaching Culture” from, take The Extraordinary Coach workshop with, and talk further to, Kathleen Stinnett, leading international authority on coaching and co-author of The Extraordinary Coach: How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow.
• Listen to and meet with Kevin Wilde, VP Organization Effectiveness and Chief Learning Officer at General Mills — a company recognized as one of the top 25 in leadership development in the U.S. and one of ZF’s longest term Clients.
• Learn from the groundbreaking leadership development approaches used by The Gap (Eric Severson, SVP Global Talent Solutions, and Heather Robsahm, Director of Leadership Development), Safeway (Dan Cousins, VP Learning and Leadership Development), and Symantec (Sandra Hunter, Sr. Director, Leadership and Employee Development — featured in last week’s blog (Symantec Leaders Show Extraordinary Results).
• Participate in two of three of Zenger Folkman’s core workshops; The Extraordinary Leader, The Extraordinary Coach, or The Inspiring Leader (click here to get more info and download brochures). Our standard fees for two days of these public workshops alone will cover this Summit fee and most of your hotel costs!
• Have breakfast, lunch, or dinner — or just chat time — with me to discuss what you’re learning and how you can apply the powerful leadership development approaches from this Summit.
• Network and share best practices with senior leaders and leadership/organization development professionals.
• Spend time with senior ZF executives, Bob Sherwin and Barbara Steel, co-authors of the highly acclaimed How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths.
• Network and enjoy dinner at Jack Zenger’s “manor estate” home on 80 acres overlooking Midway and the Wasatch Mountains.

This is not a massive convention with hundreds or thousands of people. It’s small and intimate for less than 100 participants. So register now to ensure a seat!

4th Annual Leadership Summit
July 29-August 1, 2013
Hyatt Escala Lodge, Park City, Utah
(30 minutes from Salt Lake City airport)
http://www.clemmergroup.com/zf/2013summitzf.html

I attended last year’s powerful Summit and it was outstanding. This year’s session is growing, but it’s still a very manageable size. I hope you can join us for what is fast becoming one of this field’s premier leadership development events.

Symantec is a global leader in software security, storage, and systems management. Sometimes people enviously argue that a company like Symantec can afford to invest in leadership and organization development because of their success. But a large part of Symantec’s success has resulted from these development investments.

Symantec attracts highly effective leaders from around the world. However, “there are good leaders and there are great leaders — and Symantec makes momentous efforts to help both further develop their strengths as they progress within the organization,” said Sandy Hunter, Senior Director, Leadership & Employee Development, Symantec. “We know that deploying strong leadership practices from top to bottom is going to drive better business results.”

Sandy goes on to explain, “what got them to where they are may not be sufficient to keep them successful over time, especially in a very dynamic environment. Our success depends on our ability to develop, motivate, and retain high-potential employees at every level of the company, and prepare them to take on additional responsibility as the organization grows.”

A key element in Symantec’s leadership development efforts is a program they launched in 2010 called “Top Talent.” It has three tracks for individual contributor, managers/senior managers, and directors/senior directors.

We’ve just published a case study on Symantec’s highly successful Top Talent program.

Highlights include:

• About 15 of Symantec’s full time employees are recognized as Top Talent.
• Zenger Folkman’s The Extraordinary Leader development system was used for 455 high-potential first line managers and senior managers using multiple learning strategies and technologies.
• Follow through included webinars and monthly newsletters.
• A reassessment showed the first cohort of leaders going through the program found “the results were incredibly positive. Symantec found improvement in each and every competency measured.”

Symantec is now implementing a corporate-wide high-potential program. According to Bettina Koblick, Chief HR Officer at Symantec:

“By cultivating and deploying our employees’ leadership strengths, we can drive superior performance amidst accelerating growth and competitiveness in the IT marketplace. To not accelerate their development and feed this leadership pipeline would have been a shame … We now have leaders who are intensely focused on learning, teaching, and understanding which competencies are not only valuable, but are critical to their performance.”

Click here to download and read Symantec Leaders Show “Extraordinary” Results

June 26 1:00 ET
10:00 PDT 11:00 MDT 12:00 CDT 2:00 Atlantic 6:00 UK

For years we have been warned that our labor force will be seriously affected by the aging baby-boom generation. As the years pass, however, it is becoming clear that the threat is not just the baby-boomers retiring. It is much broader. As organizations continue to experience turnover, restructuring, changes in business strategy, and market volatility, it is critical that they have leaders who can step in.

But, are these leaders prepared for success, or does a promotion mean they have just been set up for failure? The organizations that succeed in the current competitive environment will be those who have prepared their next generation of leaders.

What is Your Future Leadership Strategy?

You are invited to attend a complimentary webinar presented by Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman discussing their research-based approach to building a pipeline of effective leaders.

Jack and Joe will explore answers to these questions:

1. What’s the likely leadership scenario for your organization in the next 36 to 48 months?
2. How can you know who in your organization will be ready to assume leadership responsibilities?
3. How can you make leadership development a conscious, deliberate, and sustained strategy in your organization?
4. What has Zenger Folkman done to support other organizations as they build their leadership pipeline?

Join this information packed complimentary webinar to learn how to position your future leaders for success and ensure the ongoing health of your organization. Register here.

Last week’s blog on You Are Here: Multiple Feedback Points Locates our Leadership Skills described the work we’re currently doing introducing hundreds of leaders at one company to the groundbreaking new approach of strengths-based leadership development. As we continue to use only self-assessments to discuss leadership strengths we’re seeing an overwhelming interest in getting much more accurate — strengths-based — feedback from direct reports, peers, manager, and others. Subsequent polls are now running at 95% of participants asking for 360 strengths-based feedback.

Leading without feedback is like driving a car in unfamiliar territory in the dark with no reference points. You may have a map and know exactly where you want to go. But if you can’t pinpoint where you are, you’ll be lost. The famous 19th century American frontiersman, Daniel Boone, once quipped, “I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” Of course, being a real man he likely refused to ask for directions! Not only are many feedback-impaired leaders lost, but most refuse to ask anyone else to help them figure out where they are.

Joe Folkman has spent his long career designing feedback assessments and approaches, and helping leaders build their leadership skills around this input. He’s the foremost authority on feedback. I highly recommend Joe’s book The Power of Feedback: 35 Principles for Turning Feedback from Others into Personal and Professional Change. You can read my review of the book at Book Review: The Power of Feedback by Joe Folkman and excepts from it at Thoughts That Make You Go Hmmm on … The Power of Feedback by Joe Folkman.

My last few blogs on feedback have linked to Joe’s recent series of Forbes columns. His most recent column offers these keys for accepting feedback:

1. Assume others’ perceptions of you are real.
2. You need to care.
3. Be confident and courageous.
4. Be honest with yourself.
5. Take steps to change.

You can read more about each step at 5 Ways To Calm ‘Feedback Fires’: What We Can Learn From Celebrity Meltdowns. Decades of Joe’s research has proven that, “leaders need feedback to be effective. There is an extremely strong correlation between a leader’s ability to accept and utilize feedback and their overall effectiveness as a leader.”

The American Society for Training and Development recently asked 10 “of the biggest names in the industry” to weigh in on the past, present, and future of the profession. ASTD’s conclusion from this input was “the need for skills development, the importance of learning and development, and the link between employee performance and organizational success have remained strong during the growth of the training and development (T&D) profession.”

In looking at how the profession has evolved over the past 70 years, one of ASTD’s 10 experts, Jack Zenger, pointed out that trainer values, messages, approaches, are now much more aligned with senior leaders today as training is more focused on helping the organization achieve its objectives. Another expert added that training is evolving from the classroom to the boardroom as trainers get better at helping their organizations become more profitable and competitive.

When asked what’s been one of training and development’s greatest legacies, Jack Zenger points to the practical research showing the most critical factors creating high individual and team performance. Leadership development that drives organizational results has been one of the things I recall most vividly about our previous work with Jack stretching back to the eighties and early nineties. This was a driving factor in their work when Jack partnered with Joe Folkman around 2000. One of their greatest legacies will be how they’ve brought evidence-based approaches to leadership development and evolved the fledgling strengths-based movement from a philosophy to a science-based methodology with their Competency Companion Development Guide.

Jack foresees “continuing the trend toward evidence-based solutions rather than having training dominated by the latest bestseller. Savvy clients want data about the outcomes of learning and development efforts. At the same time, the focus will continue to shift to permanent behavior change in place of insights and good feelings. Knowing and feeling do not always lead to changed behavior, and organizations will constantly move toward changed behavior as the goal.”

Tomorrow we publish the compilation of last month’s blogs in the June issue of The Leader Letter. This issue pulls together more research and evidence-based approaches to leadership and organization development. Some of it may surprise you — like recent ZF research how on demanding leaders are also more likable. As more organizations are using competency models for leadership development there’s a growing misconception — that I used to share — on their use. We’ll also continue looking at powerful research and approaches to using feedback — both as the receiver and giver. And recent Extraordinary Coach workshops are highlighting the monkeys-gone-wild problem — Monkey Madness — overloading and overwhelming so many managers.

I hope last month’s blogs have helped you avoid groping around like a blindfolded monkey lacking feedback and using unproven approaches!

My last blog looked at using multi-rater feedback to pinpoint our leadership location. This is proving to be twice as accurate as self-assessment in identifying leadership strengths that we can magnify toward exceptional leadership.

Not only does feedback help leaders build strengths — or identify fatal flaws that could derail their career — asking for and responding to feedback creates a powerful shift in perception of everyone around the leaders. See “Feedback’s Huge Impact on Perceived Honesty and Integrity” for an intriguing look at research on how making a real effort to improve based on feedback dramatically escalates a leader’s perceived honesty and integrity.

Extraordinary leaders not only look for opportunities to get feedback, they’re also skilled at giving feedback. Zenger Folkman’s research shows the powerful impact of feedback on percentile scores of employee engagement:

The last line shows what a dramatic impact two-way feedback has on boosting employee engagement. What’s not shown in this study is how the quality of feedback given by managers impacts engagement. No doubt, higher quality feedback will send engagement levels soaring even higher.

In his Forbes column, “The 7 Best And Worst Criticisms From A Boss (And Why They Matter So Much)”, Joe Folkman provides a list of seven “worst critiques” or feedback from a manager balanced with a list of seven “best critiques” or much more effective feedback.

Use Joe’s worst critiques as a handy checklist to determine how many of these traps you and/or the managers in your organization fall into. Then use Joe’s seven how-to examples for the best feedback as a very helpful primer in framing feedback to be the most constructive and useful. These approaches dramatically increase the likelihood a leader’s feedback will be heard and acted upon with a resulting increase in engagement.

How are your feedback skills? How about the leaders in your organization? How do you know? Are you getting multi-rater feedback on your feedback skills?

We’re currently facilitating a customized version of The Extraordinary Leader development sessions with hundreds of supervisors and managers in an organization using just self-assessments. Executives in this company had very negative past experiences with using 360 feedback assessments. They agreed that those experiences came from the all too common weaknesses-based approach grounding most 360 feedback tools used today.

As Joe Folkman outlined in his recent Forbes column, Workplace Feedback: A Puzzle? A Punishment? Or a Gift? the experiences of these executives with feedback sounded like a combination of a punishment and puzzle. So we agreed to proceed with using only self-assessment as a first step in a multi-year leadership development process.

During this first workshop series participants are introduced to the revolutionary power of using a strengths-based approach. We’re also discussing Zenger Folkman’s research showing that self-assessment is only half as accurate as assessment from others. And we look at how difficult it is to locate and magnify our leadership strengths unless we get feedback on what those strengths are perceived to be. In leading and influencing others, perception is all there is.

At the end of each modified Extraordinary Leader workshop executives have asked us to poll participants on whether they’d now like to get 360 feedback on their leadership. So far, over 90% have voted in favor of getting this very valuable gift for their leadership development.

As Joe explains in Workplace Feedback: A Puzzle? A Punishment? Or a Gift?:

“We all need feedback to be successful. We’re like a GPS: With only one satellite, the GPS can’t predict your location. With only self-insight to rely upon, you can’t be sure if you’re ‘in line to become the Janitor or the CEO.’ An accurate location requires 3-4 satellites — in career terms, an accurate understanding requires feedback from managers, peers, colleagues, direct reports, and others.“

My last blog (“How Many Monkeys Are on Your Back ?“) outlined the all-too-common problems that come from the vicious Manager-Employee Dependence Spin Cycle. In their excellent book, The Extraordinary Coach: How the Best Leaders Help Others Grow, Jack Zenger and Kathleen Stinnett outline this virtuous Empowerment and Growth Cycle:

This cycle reverses the downward spiral of Monkey Madness and creates an upward spiral to extraordinary performance. In Chapter Two, “Empty Cup, New Tea,” Jack and Kathleen suggest leaders reflect on these questions to examine their underlying beliefs and mental models on coaching employees:

1. What are your underlying beliefs about your employees — their potential, their contribution, and their interest in growing and developing themselves?
2. How do you believe that you add value in your role in coaching your employees (and colleagues)? Are there other ways to add value that you have not tapped into yet?
3. What would you like your contribution to be? What role would you envision for yourself that would bring out the best version of yourself and your employees?

Based on your responses, this chapter goes on to offer these suggestions to reverse your cycle:

• Ask what support the individual is looking for regarding the problem at hand.
• Ask what solutions the individual has already thought about trying.
• Ask the individual for her assessment of the pros and cons of the path being considered.
• Encourage risk taking and innovation.
• Allow experimentation and solutions that might not have been your first preference.
• Push the authority for larger decisions down to capable employees.
• Reward and support positive improvements.

So the next time one of your team members approaches you with a monkey, respond along the lines of, “That’s an ugly little monkey you’ve got there. How can I help you manage it?” This is step one in shifting from being a zookeeper toward becoming an extraordinary coach.

My last blog (Breaking the Manager-Employee Dependence Spin Cycle) discussed how Dave, a recent participant in The Extraordinary Coach workshop, realized he’d locked himself into an ever increasing cycle of taking on more and more of his employees problems. He was getting busier and busier while his employees were getting ever more frustrated waiting for him to solve their problems.

This all too familiar problem was identified decades ago in a Harvard Business Review article by William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass entitled, “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?” Their powerful metaphor has become a common way to describe a big trap ensnaring many harried and overworked managers.

When an employee approaches or emails his or her manager and says, “Hey, boss we’ve got a problem,” they’ve got a monkey on their back and want to get rid of it. When both players are caught up in the vicious Manager-Employee Dependence Cycle the employee is looking to take the monkey from his or her back and give it to the boss. While spinning in this dependence cycle an unspoken agreement between both players is that the manager was promoted and gets paid to solve problems. So the less effective manager allows the monkey to climb onto his or her back. This frees up — and perhaps even rewards — the employee to hunt for more monkeys to bring back to the boss.

Meanwhile back in the stressed out and overburdened manager’s office — which is looking like a zoo — ineffective monkey management has created reactionary crisis management and short-term fires to be put out. Caring for and feeding the monkeys — and keeping them from making a complete mess of the manager’s work life — has become a fulltime job.

Here are a few signs of managers caught in Monkey Madness:

• Managers are overwhelmed by emails, meetings, phone calls, and urgent priorities.
• There never seems to be any time for longer term development.
• The manager does most of the talking when working with an employee to deal with operational problems/issues.
• The manager is frustrated by low employee ownership of problems/issues and having to continuously check-up on their progress.
• Employees fail to meet deadlines and keep commitments.
• Coaching discussions center on the manager providing performance feedback and giving advice.

How many monkeys are on your back or ripping your office apart? How’s your monkey management? 

During last week’s first public workshop (these sessions are usually run in-house) of The Extraordinary Coach in Calgary, the lights came on for a manager from a technology company.  Like many managers — and especially those in very technical organizations – Dave viewed coaching as directing, advising, and training his direct reports. Since he was promoted because of his deep technical expertise, he defined his role as the top technical problem solver in his team. That commonly held view — by both him and his team members — put Dave into this spin cycle:

Dave was working harder and harder as he tried to stay on top of all the issues in his department. His team members were pushing most of their problems — especially technical ones — up to him. His coaching sessions and performance review sessions, as with many managers, left the ownership of most issues with him. He was increasingly frustrated by team members’ failure to follow through on the commitments and plans Dave set with them.

The lights came as Dave realized he was doing most of the talking — consisting mainly of telling – in these sessions. So the plans set with team members were really his directives. That led to a repeating series of follow up sessions as he prodded and pushed for team members to meet the plans and commitments set with Dave. He now realized he was getting nominal compliance but not real commitment. He was spinning his wheels and looking for a new approach.

Sound familiar? For more on this cycle and breaking out of it see The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders, or our Building Extraordinary Coaching Skills archived webinar. We have just a few seats left in our June 18 and 19 Extraordinary Leader and Extraordinary Coach workshops in Mississauga (15 minutes from the Toronto airport).