Facing a Talent Gap? Keys to Engagement, Leadership Development, Succession/Career Planning, and Coaching Effectiveness

Fast-paced 60-minute webinar by Jim Clemmer on Engaging, Developing, and Coaching Leaders (at all levels) to Exceptional Performance

Keys to Engagement, Leadership Development, Succession/Career Planning, and Coaching Effectiveness

In this learning-rich and fast-paced 60 minute webcast Jim Clemmer outlines how to strengthen engagement, leadership development, succession planning, career planning, and coaching effectiveness in your organization.

Our organizations desperately want and need much stronger leadership at all levels. But a torrent of studies show most leadership development approaches aren’t working. In a McKinsey & Company large scale global survey of CEOs and senior executives, 76% cited leadership development as important, yet only 7 percent thought their organization was developing leaders effectively!

Current approaches are falling short, and a talent gap is looming. View this webinar for strategies to strengthen talent development at all levels of the organization – filling the leadership pipeline and the bottom line!

What You Will Learn:

  • The dangers of the growing talent gap and how to avoid them
  • Why current development approaches aren’t filling the leadership pipeline
  • Key leadership and performer competencies that have the greatest impact on productivity, engagement, turnover, sales, customer service, safety, and profitability
  • How to outperform by building on strengths rather than focusing on weakness
  • How to make 360 Assessments 2-3 times more effective and a positive experience
  • How cross-training moves leaders and performers from good to great
  • Building coaching skills and effectiveness with a coaching culture

Why View the Webinar?

  • Avoid the looming talent gap crunch by filling your leadership pipeline with emerging talent [Succession Planning]
  • Strategies to strengthen employee engagement
  • Keys to developing leaders at all levels of the organization
  • Help employees at all levels enhance career potential and performance management
  • Create an effective coaching culture
  • Build on strengths rather than focus on weaknesses

Why Not Fix Weaknesses?

  • 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 survey 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.”

Why Strengths-Based Leadership Development and Coaching Works Better:

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.

  • 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!

There are dramatic differences between the weakest and strongest leaders:

  • 4 – 6 times higher profits
  • 6 times higher sales revenues
  • 10 – 20 times higher levels of employee engagement
  • 3 – 4 times reduction in employees thinking about quitting
  • 50% fewer employees that do leave
  • Double the satisfaction with pay and job security
  • 4 – 5 times more employees “willing to go the extra mile.”
  • 1.5 times higher customer satisfaction ratings
  • Over 3 times safer work environment

Developing a Coaching Culture Across Your Organization

How much difference does coaching really make? Improved coaching increases all known drivers of productivity.
Research from Zenger Folkman’s database of 250,000 multi-rater feedback surveys shows this huge difference in results produced by the worst and the best coaches:

  • 8 times higher levels of employee engagement and commitment!
  • Over 3 times more willingness to “go the extra mile” for the team or organization.
  • 2.5 times higher levels of “satisfaction with my involvement in decisions that affect my work.”
  • More than double the number of employees who were inspired to “put forth a great deal of effort every day.”
  • Twice as high ratings of supervisor effectiveness.
  • Half as many employees thinking about quitting.
  • Dramatically higher levels of customer service and satisfaction.

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

The Coaching Skills Gap

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.

Our research shows that extraordinary coaches can be developed by following a proven process. In this learning-rich and fast-paced 60 minute webinar Jim will outline 6 steps to building a coaching culture with exceptional leaders.

The Clemmer Group and Zenger Folkman Partnership

The CLEMMER Group is Zenger Folkman’s Canadian strategic partner. 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.