Yearly Archive 2019

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Can Behavior or EQ alone Build a Level 5 Leader?

Bin Yang is a global Executive Adviser and the Managing Director of The Prince Synergy (www.theprincesynergy.com), a leading consulting firm that focuses on building exceptional leaders and performance management systems and reducing healthcare costs.  She is also the author of “What Stops Leaders from Good to Great.”  For more information or to schedule an interview, lecture or appointment, please contact us at 310-668-1828.

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4 Keys to Optimizing Corporate Leadership Development


Organizations
 always need great leaders who can identify emerging challenges, inspire their team, and turn strategy into effective action.   The needs only have been intensifying as changes come at an exponential speed.   A 2016 Deloitte survey found that only 13%  of companies believe they are building effective global leaders

Other firms have several suggestions on top team performance– focus on the shifts that matter, provide continuous leadership development, simplify formula, etc.   Should we just concentrate on the shifts that matter? Should institution baby sit leaders? Can one method fix all issues?  The answer is NO.

The Root Causes of Poor Corporate Leadership Development

The main root cause is partial approach– lack of knowledge of the whole human structure and use behavior tools as a short cut.  Unfortunately, behaviors often are not their root causes.

Leaders require different tools to meet challenges in various environments at different stages.   The daily skills include how to communicate and take feedback.  Others can be sleep, learning, business law utilization, etc.   If they do not have the tool(s) or the potential to acquire the tool(s) to finish ONE process, the whole journey can be in jeopardy.   Talent type, personality and others define the boundary of their potential.   Motivation DOES NOT have unlimited power.  The case below is a good example that behaviors are often secondary to challenge and only emerge AFTER a person is ON THE SPOT, which is what the 360 degree can observe.

Unable to identify the precise development needs of a leader also results in extensive time, money and opportunities waste.  Other technical causes can also delay and fail corporate leadership development, for example, how to personalize learning, install the “missing software” smoothly, and enhance learning practices.

Administrative and social causes include lack of support from CEOs and senior leaders and lack of motivations and confidence from individuals.   Some people only want “solutions” from certain resources, including themselves.  Some only respond to certain language and format.  Without knowing the underlying structure and related rules, people analytic is only behavior or psychological observation and cannot be actionable.   Thus, we need to get to the root causes and develop corporate leadership accordingly.  For leadership development history, please visit Catch the Development Needs of a Leader before 360 Degree Evaluation.

Focus on the Shifts that Matter as well as the Holes that can Leak and Sink the Boat.

Regardless what a company strategy is, individuals can have different leadership development needs and require different action to execute the same strategy.  A company opened a new category and promoted a marketing talent to be its new sub-ordinary CEO because:

  • He had years of global marketing experiences.
  • He dedicated to his roles.
  • He was willing to take risks and open to certain outside ideas.
  • He interacted with his team members fine and more

However, the person has difficulties balancing intangible financial benefit over tangible and struggles with conflict management since he was “too important.” In fact, his leadership development needs could remain INSIGNIFICANT until he was promoted to CEO.  Can his self-awareness and learning mind-set help him?  Not really since it is hard to learn to vision intangible benefit, not to mention to become almost a genius that an excellent CEO requires.  In addition, his Ego could easily become an issue once he was too important.   Warren Buffet once said, “A horse that can count numbers is a remarkable horse, but not a remarkable mathematician.”

It is wise not to correct a development area.  However, not to correct a development area should not be equal to ignore the area, or damage control can be inevitable. The case is a good example.

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How deeply do know your talent?  Take a quick assessment 
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Deliver Training according to the Needs.  No Baby-sitting. 

Each person has different leadership development needs that requires different time, action or alternative.  No fix amount time and action can guarantee a success.   Once individuals can meet current challenges, no need to update them unless their challenges change or will change, like the case above.  By knowing their 6Q, we can catch most development needs of a leader ahead of the time and take early action.  The Executive 6Q Assessment results are often good for 2 years in the absence of significant events.

No one Formula for All People Analytics but the Right one.

Recently, some HR personnel explored whether people analytics enhances performance, how to simplify their approach and make their people analytics actionable.   Their first discussion really amazed us– of course, people analytics enhances performance.  However, no one formula for all as each human part, process, environment and stage has its own rules as discussed above.   Without knowing the underlying human structure and related rules, people analytic can only be behavior or psychological observation, and, therefore, cannot be actionable.

Not long ago, we met some “leadership development experts” who evaluated leadership through psychometrics only and nailed both psychological and non-psychological issues with psychological tools.  In fact, many psychological issues are secondary to NON-psychological causes, for example failures and poor health.   To evaluate only psychometrics and target NON-psychological issues with psychological tools was why their leadership development was so poor.   Unfortunately, the “leadership development experts” could not see the whole picture because they only react to psychological signals due to their knowledge base.

For proper people analytics, please visit from PwC CEO Study to How to Go from Good to Great Efficiently.

Integrate Learning with Practices and Involve CEO and Senior Leaders as the Role Models.

Learning is another whole system approach, where knowledge structure, talent type, tenacity, resources, introspection, self-discovery, etc. can all impact the learning outcome.  One efficient way to facilitate change management and strategy execution is to make learning easy and fast.  To do so, we need to identify the development needs precisely and minimize learning resistance.   In addition, integrate learning with practices to enhance memory and turn learning into rapid action.  Our leadership group classes are designed to serve the purpose.   Practices at work are great but on and off.

Furthermore, senior leaders’ participation matters in organizational leadership development. McKinsey’s recent research found that successful corporate leadership-development programs were five to six times more likely to involve senior leaders acting as project sponsors, mentors, and coaches.  The reason is that the senior leaders are good role models and know what matters most to the company.

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How we help clients
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Speed, Results & Costs

Many CEOs strike to be exceptional but underestimate the needs to translate strategy into effective organizational capabilities that will affect their ultimate success.  In fact, corporate leadership development can achieve a quick impact through the same mechanism of building exceptional CEOs.

1. Identify the development needs of a leader before “the 360 degree,” based on the 6Q assessment result instead of IQ, EQ and Behavior alone.  The difference can be 50% of time less, efficient solutions to 30-40% “intractable” issues, and minimum damage control.
2. Install the missing tools as smoothly as possible.  The difference here can be weeks vs months, months vs years.
3. Integrate learning with practices.  The difference here can be knowledge vs action.

As the pace of change increases, so does the impact and cost of poor corporate leadership development and top team performance improvement.

How do you score in the above 4 key areas?

It is normal if you do not score high, which is why we are here.   Read how to implement the 4 keys at What Stop Leaders from Good to Great.


About the Author 
Bin Yang is the Managing Director of The Prince Synergy (www.theprincesynergy.com), a leading consulting firm that focuses on building exceptional leaders to strengthen society and solves the hardest issues in leadership and performance that no one else can.  She is also the author of What Stop Leaders from Good to Great, that many Fortune 500 CEOs wish they have long before their “retirement.”

For more information or to schedule an interview, lecture, or appointment, please contact 310-668-1828.

 

ByTips

How Should CEOs Deal with Stress?

Many people do not understand why CEO stress has anything to do with CEO health.  In fact, the two are closely connected.

Recently, the health of Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, has raised a national discussion.  Many people think that his health is not his private matter because so many others depend upon him. Some even have raised a stock security issue.  Forbes has pointed out that the Apple CEO turned to cancer removal surgery eight months after the diagnosis.  Would there be less unfortunate issues to begin with if leaders could take better care of themselves?

When talking about how to be a CEO, people usually do not think about sustainability at times of unexpected change, intense stress, illness or injury.  Unfortunately, life is full of unexpected challenges, which can disable our mind, or even take away our success. It takes a different set of skills to sustain our optimal creativity and health than to utilize them.  It is important to have both. An unfortunate outcome affects not only the key person, but also his/her family, partners, colleagues, employees and more.

Can You Count on Doctors?

People tend to count on doctors for their health.  However, how we handle illnesses before and after seeing doctors can mean life or death, recovery or disability. Although I had excellent medical training, I could have lost my mother had I not questioned the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) physicians after a tragic auto-accident. My mother suffered a cervical-2 fracture. Even after five weeks of intensive care, she could not get off of the ventilator. Her ICU physicians “concluded” that she would be ventilator-dependent for the rest of her life. My mother refused to live on a machine. I never doubted the ICU physicians. But at the last moment, I chose to do my own assessment and found that she did not breathe efficiently. Through a new way of breathing I taught her, my mother was taken off the ventilator successfully after only three days!

In another example, a prestigious rehab center had some very well-known experts in Traumatic brain injury (TBI). These experts concluded that the poor impulse control secondary to TBI was incurable since they could not find the cure. A resident physician with a history of TBI had one unfortunate incident. These experts linked the incident with her past injury and concluded that she had a poor impulse control and could not handle stress. They took away her residency training at the last minute even through her references from clinical training prior were excellent. Instead of telling her their reasoning, they told her something else, which has caused her a huge waste of time and money. In fact, the victim had found a way to correct the impulse control. But to these experts, if they could not find the cure, no one could! And they abandoned their own victim when their support was needed most!

Not everyone needs to go to medical school. However, we need general and systemic health knowledge about ourselves and different health systems, for example, what costly health mistakes to avoid, and how to select specialists. We need to stay in charge, especially when it is a matter of life or death, recovery or disability. A part of our 4-day Executive Synergy Program provides hands-on training in this area.

What is Missing in Your Stress Management?

According to a survey of Vistage (an international organization for CEOs), 100 percent of 2,400 participating CEOs are suffering stress. CEO stress can come from external sources, like an uncertain economy. CEO stress can also come from our body and mind, such as the examples described above. Stress, while a great motivator, can disable our thinking and creativity, which are the keys to leadership.  Stress can also harm our health and emotions.   To some extend, a par of how to be a CEO is how to manage CEO stress.   An exceptional CEO usually manages stress at another level.

Stress management to many people is limited relaxation exercises, such as deep breathing, brisk walking, meditation, Yoga and breaks. These are not enough to handle intense CEO stress. We need to build up our personal relaxation hierarchies for different levels of stress.  At The Prince Synergy,  we call it “overarmed.” We need a clear mind to look into underlying causes and figure out solutions.  Different people need different relaxation hierarchies.

Another common definition of stress management is “coping with stress” and “positive thinking.” We don’t have to “live with stress.” We can prevent, utilize, reduce and transform stress. We can manage stress in many ways, business, medical, legal or even “technical” ways.  A CEO suffered newly onset insomnia due to insecurities of her business. None of her relaxation methods or sleeping pills worked. Sleep is very important to productivity and wellness.  She could not have a real sense of security until her business thrived, which could take time. However, she could use her faith as “the sense of security” by placing it into her unconscious level.  Afterward, she has been sleeping like a log every night.   In addition to faith, law can also help to eliminate stress and subsequent insomnia.

Strong stress management training is even more important at times of extreme crisis, where the level of stress is highest. Some CEOs tend to check themselves into the hospital.  I had a crisis in 2007, and started crisis management immediately. I used my relaxation hierarchy to keep a clear mind, and in the meantime, kept telling myself that the crisis was not the end of the world. Instead of going to the hospital, I worked on my solution to turn the crisis into an opportunity the same night.

Our beliefs, perceptions, standards, visions and expectations can also affect the outcome. The cases of my mother and the rehab center are also good examples of blindly following authority figures (such as the ICU physicians) and assumptions.

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How well do you manage stress?  Take a quick assessment
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Mind, Body & Society Are Integrated

What we can see in society and ourselves determines how we act and what we can achieve. I did not value Eastern medicine at medical school. After being through family injuries and personal challenges, I have appreciated its recovery and relaxation power more and more. I sometimes acupuncture myself and pick up my own herb tea for certain types of tiredness and stress. I did not know about the internet or computers in high school. What I want and can do today is different from what was possible back then. There are many ways to sustain our optimal levels. We won’t “see” them until we are open to them.

How we act can also affect our health and potential profoundly.  A star athlete from Fargo High School joined Stanford on a four-year football scholarship. After he ran into bigger and meaner competitors, he chose to focus upon his economics major. He has since built a multi-billion-dollar investment firm.  What if he had chosen steroid for temporary gain, or used drugs for temporary high like many others? He would have to face more problems down the road, such as systemic injuries or various issues related to addictions, such as cirrhosis and gastric mass.

Our mind, body and stress management are one integrated system. We can be limited internally and externally. The limitations can lead to stress issues in business and health if we do not take care them efficiently. We can and need to, utilize our full internal and external resources efficiently, and prosper in business and life.   Leaders should not settle with how to be a CEO, but how to be an exceptional CEO.

In summary, the skills to utilize our creativity and health and to lead are different from those to sustain the potential from unexpected change, intense stress, costly health mistakes and injury. In this age of intense competition, CEOs need these skills to stay at their optimal level and save subsequent agony from CEO stress.  To identify your “missing software” or alternative and help you build a firewall for your leadership is included in all of our leadership programs.  This is not only about how to be a CEO, one key individual, but also about your family, partners, colleagues, employees and more.

About the Author

Bin Yang is the Founder and CEO of The Prince Synergy, a worldwide leading resource that focuses on Level 5 leadership and health recovery from unexpected change, stress, illness and injury.  Its services have been featured in Forbes and Euroinvestor.  Yang possesses a strong background in medicine, Law and Business. For more info, please contact us at 310-668-1828.