Close

Complimentary Executive Briefing

Strengthening Top Talent – Complimentary Executive Briefing

To be announced

Engaging, Developing, and Coaching Leaders (at all levels) to Exceptional Performance

This event has already taken place.
View an Archived Webinar

Turn high potential leadership into a highly successful organization with a culture of coaching and leadership development.

Join Jim Clemmer for a complimentary 1/2 day executive briefing on October 28th from 8:30am – noon and learn how to strengthen and cultivate talent development at all levels of your organization.

Why Attend?

  • Organizations need to reverse the looming talent gap
  • How we traditionally develop leaders hasn’t been nearly effective enough
  • Organizations needs to cultivate future leaders and strengthen current leaders
  • Organizations need to increase employee engagement and retention
  • Higher performing employees at all levels impact productivity, engagement, turnover, sales, customer service, safety, and profitability
  • Individual contributors aspiring to be extraordinary can result in tremendous gains in productivity and create new potential career opportunities
Register Now!

Spaces are limited. No charge

Leadership development and a culture of coaching impact all aspects of an organization — directly affecting the bottom line, through:

  • higher sales and higher profits
  • increased employee engagement and satisfaction
  • retaining top talent, developing future leaders and succession planning
  • higher customer satisfaction
  • safer work environment
  • a corporate culture that attracts the best employees to the organization
  • engaged performers at all levels motivated to increase their ability to contribute

What You Will Learn

Talent Management
  • Strategies to improve retention and engagement
  • How to cultivate emerging leaders/talent
  • Provide the motivation and tools for employees at all levels to become extraordinary performers
Leadership Development
  • Research on key leadership competencies that have the greatest impact
  • How to help leaders and performers become exceptional by building on their existing strengths
Coaching Skills
  • Succession planning – building the leadership pipeline
  • How to help build coaching skills, coaching culture

Who Should Attend?

This event is aimed at medium and large organizations:

  • CEOs, CAOs, General Managers, and Divisional VPs
  • Learning and Development Professionals
  • Senior Human Resource Executives
  • Organization Development/Effectiveness Professionals

Briefing Agenda

The Growing Talent Gap

Studies are showing:

  • 70% of executives think their organization lacks adequate bench strength
  • 97% of organizations report serious leadership gaps, 40% say these are severe
  • 65 to 75% of current senior management will be eligible to retire by 2020
  • Of leaders hired from the outside, it is estimated that 40% are pushed out or leave 18 months after joining an organization
  • 60% of companies facing leadership shortages that impede their performance
  • 31% say developing leaders is their largest talent issue

Current Development Approaches Aren’t Working

Needs assessments and performance evaluations look for gaps and design training programs to fix weaknesses. This is a major reason participant motivation to build skills has been very low and transfer of learning poor. In a large scale global survey of CEOs and senior executives 76 percent cited leadership development as important yet only 7 percent thought their organization was doing it effectively.

Differentiating Competencies of Exceptional Performers and Leaders

Research involving over 500,000 raters has identified the 16 competencies within 5 clusters that define poor, ordinary, and extraordinary frontline performers and leaders. These skills have a measureable impact on productivity, engagement, turnover, sales, customer service, safety, and profitability.

The High Leverage of Building Strengths

A leader needs to develop just three existing strengths out of 16 competencies to increase his or her leadership effectiveness from the 34th to the 80th percentile! Building strengths is proving to be the only way to move an average or ordinary performer or leader to extraordinary.

Critical Components of a Best-of-Class 360 Assessment

360 feedback tools have focused on finding and fixing weaknesses. This often evokes a negative and defensive participant response. Research shows fixing weaknesses is 2 to 3 times less effective than using a strengths-based approach – if 10 key points are followed.

Building Strengths Through Cross-Training

Building strengths from good to great can’t be done through traditional linear training. Research based cross-training provides a map for developing leadership strengths from good to extraordinary (90th percentile) by building around them using cross-competency correlations.

Developing Extraordinary Coaching Skills

  • Defining What Coaching Is and Isn’t
  • Appreciating the Huge Impact of Coaching Effectiveness
  • Using a Coaching Conversation Framework
  • Bringing Science to Coaching
  • Building Coaching Effectiveness Through Skill Development
  • Strengthening Coaching Collaboration

Programs and Services Options

Assessments, consulting, workshops, and coaching services available from The CLEMMER Group to implement the approaches covered in this briefing.

Client Feedback on our Strengths-Based Leadership Development System

“Using ZF’s ‘cross training’ approach; our leaders achieved an across-the-board improvement of close to 15% in their year-over-year employee commitment scores. Not only did our best leaders get better, but our ‘average’ leaders and even our poorest leaders showed marked improvement in their leadership effectiveness and employee commitment scores. This improvement was a critical factor in our qualifications for the Malcolm Baldrige award, which our division won.”
– Dee Thomas, HR Director, Boeing Aerospace Support

“The Extraordinary Leader research caused us to rethink our performance management philosophy. We revamped our process to orient it more toward building employees’ strengths. The results have been remarkable. We now have a more balanced performance agreement, highlighting areas of strength, and significant problems that must be fixed. The biggest change has been in the energy people have for the performance management process. It is now something that most employees look forward to. How many companies can say that?”
– Mary Settle, Vice President of Human Resources, BARD Access Systems

“…the path to greatness is really about building profound strengths, rather than through relentlessly focusing on one’s weaknesses. “
– Michael A. Peel, Yale University, Vice President, Human Resources and Administration

“These past few years (ZF) have proven helpful in filling the gap from inspirational to practical ‘how to’ realities of leadership improvement. The difference is an unusual blend of credible and uncompromising research married with years of successful application with leaders and organizations. The result is innovative, at times challenging conventional wisdom, and ultimatelyuseful. I have seen talent in my organization engage and improve based on this work.”
– Kevin D. Wilde, VP, Organization Effectiveness and Chief Learning Officer, General Mills, author of Dancing with the Talent Stars: 25 Moves That Matter Now

“…the next evolution of focusing on strengths…compelling research to understand what it takes to become an exceptional leader. The insightful tools and developmental approaches help address fatal flaws and push your existing strengths over the edge to exceptional.”
– Linda Simon, Senior Vice President, Leadership and Organizational Development, DIRECTV

“My organization has benefited for years from Zenger Folkman’s involvement in our Leadership Training Programs… we have seen that people are much more successful when we focus on improving their natural leadership strengths while minimizing their weaknesses.”
– Stephen K. Wiggins, EVP, Chief Information Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina; coauthor, Picasso on a Schedule

“…lifting leadership effectiveness from the (somewhat pejorative) realm of ‘soft skills’ to a plane that equates these competencies with ‘harder’ disciplines in two ways: not only can these skills be learned, but they can have a similar impact on bottom-line results and employee performance. Leadership cross-training is an approach that can have a powerful impact on helping good leaders become exceptional ones.”
– Jaime Gonzales, Head of Professional Development, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Client Feedback on The Extraordinary Coach

“A strong, empirically-based approach to cut right to the heart of the (coaching) issue to provide something both situationally-relevant and contextually profound…threads the needle between theory and anecdotal practice and provide perspective and tools that can benefit everyone from CEOs bent on changing culture to frontline managers plying their skills on the factory floor.”
– Courtney Rogers, Executive Director, Human Resources and Talent, Amgen

“A powerful, yet digestible, framework to help leaders become the coaches they aspire to be: relationship-based, collaboration-oriented, change-focused, and FUEL-ed for success! Leaders in all types of organizations, and at all levels, will benefit from this insightful work.”
– P. Artell Smith, Vice President, Human Resources, Hewitt Associates

“This critical leadership skill begins with a context of research, moves to the realities of the workplace, and then settles into a series of practical guidelines and examples.”
– Ronald E. Galbraith, Chairman/Chief Consulting Officer, onFocus|Healthcare

“The concepts are profound and practical… provides the FUEL for our approach to creating a coaching culture at Associated Food Stores.”
– Steve Jones, Manager, AFS University, Associated Food Stores

Revolutionary Strengths-Based Leadership Development System

“You cannot build performance on weaknesses. You can build only on strengths. To focus on weakness is not only foolish; it is irresponsible. It is a misuse of a human resource.”
Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

Traditional assessments and training needs analysis look for gaps and “improvement areas.” And most 360 feedback tools also focus on finding and fixing weaknesses. These common approaches typically lead to:

  • Leadership training programs focused on fixing weaknesses.
  • Little follow through and implementation of leadership development plans.
  • Defensive or low priority responses to organizational surveys reports.
  • Misuse and avoidance of 360 feedback tools.
  • Data denial and feedback phobia.
  • Working on weaker areas and improving a few from poor to good – with mediocre results.
  • A belief that extraordinary leadership is achieved by naturally gifted or “born leaders.”

Zenger Folkman’s deep research shows very clearly that it’s the presence of strengths – not the absence of weaknesses – that defines highly effective leaders. Building strengths is proving to be the only way to move from an average or ordinary leader to extraordinary or exceptional.

ZF’s Strengths-Based Leadership Development System is a Revolution.

The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s new Canadian strategic partner (learn more at Strengths-Based Leadership Development Index). ZF is the world’s premier provider of leadership research, assessment, development, and implementation systems. Jim Clemmer and Jack Zenger’s training and consulting firms first partnered when they led The Achieve Group and Zenger Miller. In the past decade ZF has become renowned for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations. It’s a well developed and highly proven system that produces extraordinary results.

In a series of pre and post studies ZF looked at the impact of leaders choosing to fix weaknesses versus building on existing strengths. 12 to 18 months later the leaders who magnified their existing strengths showed two – three times more improvement in leadership effectiveness than leaders who worked on fixing their weaknesses.

Why strengths-based Leadership Development Works Better:

  • Building strengths is the only way to become an extraordinary leader.
  • A strengths focus produces up to three times higher change and improvement.
  • Profits, sales, engagement, morale, and energy levels, turnover, health and safety, and customer satisfaction skyrockets.
  • The spectrum of development methods broadens with cross-training and Companion Competencies.
  • Participant motivation to improve is much higher.
  • Organizational culture is much more positive and energized.
  • It’s a lot more fun to work on strengths!

What’s especially remarkable is how obtainable extraordinary leadership is proving to be. A leader needs to develop just three existing strengths out of sixteen competencies to catapult his or her leadership effectiveness from the 34th to the 80th percentile!

Powerful New Coaching Skills Development System

Only 11% of employees listed their supervisors when asked “whom do you turn to for advice on problems at work?”
Study on the need for improved coaching skills development

Organizational surveys show that most managers believe they are providing coaching to employees and score themselves high. However, most employees state they receive little coaching from their leaders and score their leaders low.

Leaders often fall into these common coaching traps:

  • Trapped by reactive problem solving that puts out short-term fires and doesn’t build long-term personal, team, or organization capabilities.
  • Jumping into coaching discussions with little planning and no framework to guide the conversation.
  • Confusing giving advice/feedback with coaching.
  • Perpetuating the Manager-Employee Dependence Cycle: Employee complains about what’s not working, hopes for solutions and advice from the manager, and expects him or her to own the issue. The manager listens to the problem, gives advice, and expects results from the employee.
  • Climbing The Ladder of Inference way too quickly; rapidly stepping up from data/observations, to adding meaning, making assumptions, jumping to conclusions, adopting beliefs, and taking actions that often damages relationships and doesn’t deal with the root issue.
  • Spending 85 – 90% of conversations with employees on project or status updates and very little time on coaching and developing. Employees want a 50/50 ratio.
  • Confusing performance appraisal/management with performance coaching.

What’s Really Creating the Coaching Gap?

When asked why they aren’t providing more coaching managers will typically say I am overwhelmed and don’t have enough time, my boss doesn’t coach me, or my employees don’t need coaching. Our research shows these are excuses coming from low performing leaders without coaching mindsets on wobbly foundations of weak coaching skills. Within the very same organization conditions and culture, working for the same senior leaders, with the same set of employees exceptional leaders provide extraordinary coaching – and deliver dramatically higher performance results than their lesser skilled peers.

Here are four of the main reasons many managers don’t develop their coaching skills:

  • Avoiding potentially uncomfortable discussions.
  • Insecure about the true value of his or her coaching.
  • Misunderstanding the true nature of good coaching.
  • Direct reports seldom ask for it.

Share This