All Posts Tagged With: "senior leaders"
Baldrige Model: How do your senior leaders lead?
Item 1.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how senior leaders lead. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for senior leaders to:
- Set, review, and refine your mission, vision, and values
- Deploy your vision and values throughout the organization
- Demonstrate their commitment to your values and to legal and ethical behavior, including promoting an organizational environment that requires legal and ethical behavior
- Create a sustainable organization that includes an environment for performance improvement and leadership, accomplishing your mission and strategic objectives, innovation, and agility
- Create a workforce culture focused on the customer
- Create a learning organization, including participating in organizational learning and developing and enhancing their leadership skills
- Conduct succession planning and develop future leaders
- Communicate with and engage the entire workforce including two-way communication, sharing key decisions, and participating in reward and recognition programs
- Create a focus on action to achieve the organization’s objectives, improve performance, and attain its vision
Best practices to consider:
- Senior leaders, including the president/CEO, are personally and actively involved in designing, implementing, improving, and following these key processes.
- Senior leaders align strategic plans and measurement systems with the organization’s mission and vision, and they talk about the mission…
Overcompensated Leaders and Their Tools
According to the Institute for Policy Studies, American CEOs make 263 times the average compensation for American workers. The average pay for CEOs is eight times what it was in 1970 while American workers are taking home less in real weekly wages than they were in the 1970s.
Most Americans seem to be okay with that. A good number want to extend the tax cuts for these rich folks for reasons that escape me. And we all know the inequities will only continue to grow: The system for paying CEOs is broken beyond repair since the people in control of the system, who are the CEOs and their boardroom buddies, are the ones who benefit from it.
Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, made more than $20 million in 2009 while laying off around 12,000 people. Many Americans, including a good number of workers who are making less now than they or their parents did in 1970, seem to care more about protecting Mr. Stephenson’s right to earn and keep as much money as he can than about the 12,000 people who lost their jobs because of his management team’s incompetence. Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg only earned around $17 million in 2009…
2Sep2010 | Steve George | 2 comments | ContinuedLeading Also Means Managing
Some leaders believe that leadership and management are two different things and they are only responsible for one of them. In “True Leaders Are Also Managers” (HBR, August 11, 2010), Robert I. Sutton uses the words of Warren Bennis to describe a common perception: “To manage means to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct. Leading is influencing, guiding in a direction, course, action, opinion. The distinction is crucial.”
Sutton disagrees, arguing that such a distinction produces leaders with big, vague ideas that can have little to do with reality or can be nearly impossible to implement. It isolates leaders from reality, giving them a reason “to avoid the hard work of learning about the people that they lead, the technologies their companies use, and the customers they serve.”
The Baldrige Criteria does not make this distinction. The first Category in the Criteria asks a number of questions about how senior leaders lead and manage:
- How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders personally promote an organizational environment that fosters, requires, and results in legal and ethical behavior? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders create a sustainable organization? (Lead)
- How do senior leaders create an environment for…
CEOs Look Ahead
A new study by IBM features one-on-one interviews with 1,500 corporate and public sector leaders in 60 countries and 33 industries. Asked what they think the top business strategy will be for the next five years, 88% believe that getting closer to the customer is most important, 81% said people skills, and 76% listed insight and intelligence. (“The Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs? Creativity,” Austin Carr, FastCompany, May 18, 2010)
The CEOs identified the most important leadership qualities over the next five years as creativity (60%), integrity (52%), and global thinking (35%). American CEOs ranked integrity higher than CEOs in other parts of the world by 65% compared to 29-48%. Nearly double the number of CEOs in China listed global thinking as a top leadership quality compared to European and North American CEOs.
Here at Baldrige.com we have talked quite a bit about the need to get closer to your customers and approaches for doing so. In “Stakeholder Mapping” we looked at a new approach to identifying stakeholders and their requirements and organizing the information for planning and action. In “Be Careful How You Measure Customer Satisfaction,” we exposed some of the weaknesses of traditional measures and offered new alternatives. In “Walk in Your…
20May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedUndercover and Out of Touch
I haven’t watched much of the new TV show, Undercover Boss, because it sounds manipulative and because any boss who has to go undercover to find out how his company really works is not the kind of role model we should learn from.
Visionary leadership is a Baldrige core value. It emphasizes senior leaders’ personal involvement in communicating, coaching the workforce, developing future leaders, and recognizing employees. Visionary leaders do this every day, not just when a TV camera is turned on, and they do it without a disguise. They interact with their people daily, in every imaginable venue, nurturing an environment in which employees feel valued and engaged.
In “Management Lessons from Undercover Boss” (HBR, March 23, 2010), Michelle Buck, director of leadership initiatives at the Kellogg School of Management, points out that “leadership is a relationship, a partnership, and employee engagement isn’t just a soft and fuzzy topic but has bottom-line implications.” Senior leaders who spend their days holed up in their offices or surrounded by other executives cannot build the relationships or strengthen the partnerships that sustain great companies.
I spent much of last week traveling to sales offices in Europe with the president of a company with a half-billion dollars…
30Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedLeading the Integration of Baldrige
One of the ways organizations integrate Baldrige is by putting an executive in charge of each Baldrige category. The executive is responsible for:
- Understanding what the category addresses, which means understanding the category questions in the Baldrige Criteria
- Knowing how the organization performs on those questions, which means understanding your organizations’ strengths and opportunities for improvement (which requires some type of Baldrige assessment)
- Developing strategies and actions to address the opportunities, which often become part of the organization’s strategic plan
- Being accountable for improving performance on the areas addressed by the category, which usually involves reviewing performance with the senior leadership team on a monthly or quarterly basis
In some organizations, the executive/category “owner” leads a category team that shares these responsibilities. This approach is less effective if the team ends up doing all the work and the executive is a figurehead. Effectively integrating Baldrige will transform your organization, bringing significant change that requires senior leadership. It will be less effective—if it occurs at all—if executives delegate that integration.
Most organizations take a logical approach to assigning executives to categories (with equivalent positions in schools and government agencies):
- The CEO takes Leadership
- The head of marketing and/or sales takes Customer Focus
- The CIO or head of IT takes Measurement…
Fixing the Financial System
How does your organization review and achieve accountability for management’s actions? For fiscal accountability? For transparency in your operations? For protection of stakeholder and stockholder interests?
If every financial institution in the U.S. had been forced to answer these Baldrige questions honestly and accurately in the past few years, and if regulators had been verifying their responses, the financial crisis and the bailout it triggered could have been averted. Either they would have had processes in place to deliver ethical and effective leadership or their irresponsible practices would have been exposed.
“I think the last two years have revealed the single largest failure of senior management in the financial sector, and of the board system in American history,” wrote Bo Cutter in new deal 2.0 (November 24, 2009). Cutter has been a managing director of Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm, and led President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget transition team. Considering the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and the scandals involving Enron and Worldcomm earlier this decade, one could argue that senior management and boards of directors in the financial sector have been failing miserably for thirty years. One could also make the case that the…
4Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
