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Tranforming Your Best Technical People into Great Managers and Leaders
"Even if executive coaching cost $50K (which it doesn’t), it’s barely a rounding error to invest in the coaching of a key player who has responsibility for millions of dollars and for key human resources. Coaching is a success when one direct report, who used to be too intimidated to speak up, comes up with an innovative idea."
- CEO, Fortune 100 Company
A person’s strengths and weaknesses as a leader are largely a function of their basic personality. “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or anything else, is always a portrait of himself…”(1903) - Samuel Butler Novelist “Leaders must learn how to optimize their primary tool – their ‘self’ – if they are going to be fully effective as executives and leaders. Their ‘self’ is the foundation for their ability to impact, to influence, to motivate, and to deliver results.”
- Mark Brenner, PhD Brenner Consulting Group
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”
- Malcom Forbes
“An executive’s manual dexterity in using (their ‘self’) as an instrument will be only as good as their knowledge of themselves. Knowing what their instrument is capable of doing, enables them to capitalize on strengths. Being aware of what it cannot do, makes it possible for them to limit the damage done by weaknesses. Executives who operate in this heads-up way perform much more effectively because they adapt better to the ever-changing situation: they are more flexible.”
- R.E. Kaplan, PhD Center for Creative Leadership
Objectives
- To accelerate and optimize the development of key contributors to the organization
- To build high performance leaders and future leaders who can fulfill the organization’s vision, goals, and business strategy
- To maximize managerial benchstrength and overall organizational capability: have the right person for the right job at the right time
- To link the behavior of high-impact contributors to the business plan
- To retool command-and-control managers into effective leaders of the flattening, information-based organization
How We Do It
Specializing in optimizing human performance, Finger Consulting has designed a powerful individual coaching program that integrates our core competencies:
- Advanced expert systems that enhance psychological testing and assessment
- Effective 360º technology
- Keen diagnostic skills
- Ability to build rapport quickly
- Accelerated development strategies
- Motivating and creating true behavior change
By integrating these performance development technologies, we assist the candidate in assembling the three essential ingredients for high performance: feedback (both broad and deep), multi-lateral motivation to make changes, and change partners for their development initiative. Together, these three elements serve as the infrastructure for a Blueprint for Action, which guides the candidate’s achievement of measurable results.
Design Methodology
The program is designed around the principles of adult learning and around the structure of the adult learning cycle. It is now well established that adults:
- Prefer self-direction when involved in learning and development.
- Improve their performance best through experience, experimentation and low risk; adults develop most effectively and most efficiently on the job.
- Develop only when there is a clearly perceived need (i.e., pressure) to change. In essence, learning for adults is a response to real-life problems and challenges.
- Are competency-based learners, in that they are motivated to learn and change only when they can apply the learning in a pragmatic way to immediate circumstances. That is, utility rules.
- Can also be motivated to learn by appealing to personal growth and personal gain; i.e., WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?).
- Can also be inspired to develop if enhanced self-esteem and/or empowerment are part of the deliverables.
The adult learning cycle is integral to the adult learning model. The four key steps in the cycle are:
- Assess
- Plan
- Act
- Reassess and Refine
Given this structure, our Program to Transform Your Best Technical People into Great Managers and Leaders unfolds as follows:
Assess
- Conduct a series of life-career interviews with the candidate, focusing on:
- personal and work history
- interpersonal experiences
- attitudes, values, and interests
- aspirations
- Assess the candidate, using an array of business-based psychological inventories and 360º tools.
- Integrate performance management data into the assessment.
“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.”
- Galileo
“The foundation of national wealth is really people – the human capital represented by their knowledge, skills, organizations, and motivations. The primary assets of a modern corporation leave the workplace each night to go home to dinner.”
- Hudson Institute Workforce 2000
Plan
- Deliver an in-depth, confidential debrief of all assessment findings.
- Identify the candidate’s key strengths and areas in need of development, as they related to personal aspirations and to the business strategy.
- Clarify inner motivators for change and inner resistance to it. Clearly specify the benefits that change will have for the candidate and for the organization.
- Synthesize the findings into a Blueprint for Action
- Detail the specific behavioral changes desired – precisely what does the candidate want to continue, start, and stop doing?
- Identify all of the benefits that will accrue to the candidate and to the organization when the behavioral changes are achieved.
- Similarly, identify all of the potential roadblocks (inner, interpersonal, organizational, etc.) that could hinder the change effort.
- Specify the action steps that will be required to achieve the change goals.
- Determine how to enlist the involvement of others. Change requires support from others, playing an array of roles: coach, mentor, colleague, friend, role model, counselor, protégé, advocate, and so forth. Change requires change partners.
- Establish time frames and metrics, against which progress is measured.
Act
- Recognize and reciprocate with those who gave feedback to the candidate. Enlist one or some as a change partner.
- Debrief candidate’s manager and involve them in refining the Blueprint for Action.
- Begin action experiments during real-time, day-to-day work life, then debrief and further refine with coach.
- Adopt high-impact behavioral change techniques.
- Measure progress against plan. Design simple and practical feedback loops into work routine.
Reassess and Refine
This final phase of the adult learning cycle works best when it is hard-wired into the Action Phase of the cycle. By designing a monitoring and evaluation tool, the candidate can regularly reflect on progress and then recalibrate the Blueprint for Action.
Read more this topic in our article: Are Your IT Managers Stuck in the Iron Age?