Randy was interviewed while in Brisbane by Research News, the publication of the Australian Market and Social Research Society.

Glass ceiling author still waiting for more diversity among leaders

During his visit to Australia this year, Dr Randall White argued leaders need to be able to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity, rather than just take a command and control approach.

As an international thought leader in the field of executive coaching and leadership development – and the ‘token guy’ in the team that wrote the 1987 hit Breaking the Glass Ceiling – Dr Randall White was invited to Brisbane to deliver a keynote address at the 2011 Organisational Psychology Conference.

At the same conference, Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) CEO Serge Sardo argued that Australian businesses needed to move on from the concept of ‘the leader’ to the concept of ‘leadership’ and building a culture within an organisation that nurtures new leaders. READ MORE.

On leadership:

White cites Joe Rost, who claimed that there are more than 300 definitions of leadership in the West alone, but when asked to define a good leader, he says, ‘Effective leaders create an environment where everybody can maximise their potential, whatever that is. I think effective leaders aren’t afraid to surround themselves with people who are better than them. They are open to asking for, receiving and giving feedback about their performance. They aren’t afraid to be confronted by people around them who are faster, quicker, brighter and more prescient. You start to see the best in leaders when they come to understand that it’s about the legacy that they leave behind them.’ READ MORE.

Diversity in leadership:

He says it’s also important to acknowledge that one of the best breeding grounds for leaders is a start-up.

‘Across a wide variety of industries, we see excluded classes of people – women, those who might be termed minorities – starting up their own businesses because they get to write their own rules and create their own culture. They bring different kinds of behaviour to the leadership enterprise. Start-ups give people the opportunity to try their hand at leadership whereas, if they were in a larger organisation, they might not experience as big a stretch.’…

Leaders don’t just come packaged as white, male and 6’1 ”
White says organisational psychology could be potentially very helpful in helping those in the market and social research industry develop leaders, because it encourages people to try out different ideas.

‘For example, let’s have more diverse teams because the greater heterogeneity the more likely the business is to achieve its objectives.’READ MORE.

I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better. —Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/03/111003fa_fact_gawande#ixzz1Zvwelyd2

Randy White’s keynote address at the Australian Psychological Society got the attention of the Australian Financial Review and netted a feature article by Fiona Smith. Read “When being unsure is a strength” here.

Soon after, Australian blogger, Dwight Towers picked up on the theme with some of his own commentary, calling it “Kinda good.” Hey, that’s high praise in this age of managed expectations. Read it here.

The Hobart-based employee assistance firm of Newport and Wildman felt the message is meaningful to their mission to include it on their home page.

Dr. Randall P. White describes India as an emerging meritocracy in a side bar to the cover story, “How Indian Firms Beat the World,” this month in Talent Management.

Executive Development Group is currently providing executive education in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

“…India is a fascinating crucible for what could become a true meritocracy.

Perhaps what the West can most effectively learn, in an immediately practical way, is:

• People who live in emerging economies see learning—and learning fast—as a primary competitive advantage.

• Knowledge-based reward and advancement may improve the work environment by diminishing the cult of personality.

• A corporation that believes in its learning initiatives can become a true meritocracy.

• The West needs to reevaluate and invest in education at every level long before graduates arrive at the corporation.

• For the near term, US corporations need to take on a retraining role, taking on people who come of age in an era of educational mediocrity. In the longer term, corporations will need to help any number of stakeholders revamp the US educational system.”

Read the entire article here.

Here’s an excellent interview with our friend and colleague Liz Mellon, speaking about her book Inside the Leader’s Mind.

Thinkers 50.

Liz Mellon walks with us among dozens of leaders, whether sharing their most public moments or abiding their most unguarded confidence to report her observations and present a behavioral prescription, not for success in itself, but for a sublime personal fulfillment that generates success.

Mellon, the respected academic-and one of the best professors of leadership I know-manages to write in the voice of a thoughtfully investigative journalist, as we are introduced to some of the most interesting organizational leaders in the world. Her keenly empathetic ear helps makes their examples accessible and helpful to leaders at all stages of development. Mellon reveals the sets of common behaviors that we can all study, understand and emulate.

Inside the Leader’s Mind: Five Ways to Think Like a Leader has an engaging cadence that carries us from planting mangroves in Malaysia with a CEO during his corporate training program to the cloistered boardroom blunders of the Deepwater Horizon debacle. Throughout the journey, we meet leaders who fail with bravado, relearn with aplomb and rise back with selfless humility.

Inside the Leader’s Mind articulates a vital catalyst for excellence in a chaotic business environment: ambiguity. As Mellon describes her “Five Ways of Thinking Like a Leader,” the reader is counseled to face realities of solitude and bruising public accountability and, at the same time, the reader is enticed by the narratives of those who navigate the perils to find immense joy as the leaders they set out to be.

Mellon informs the learning community, the psychological academy and all business executives who seek advancement in the highest echelons of global organizations with casually insightful scenarios from topical interviews both recent and revisited from her decades of leadership study.

We see that among globally diverse leaders, the commonality is the unknown. The deck has been reshuffled as powerful nations are digging out from collapse and emerging nations have never seen such golden opportunities.

Challenging the notions of leadership that were responsible for the world’s greatest financial crisis of a century, Inside the Leader’s Mind offers a new path that is as rewarding as it is courageous.

The good news is: nobody has enough information, so here’s your chance for greatness.

There is a great deal of leadership development work to be done in emerging markets, especially China. The work is demanding, reasonably lucrative, and fun. I find our time and counsel to be in demand with classrooms full of committed, motivated, and affable learners.

As a child of the Cold War, the concept of mutually assured destruction has lately become an almost quaint linguistic relic along the lines of duck and cover, made popular in civil defense films. The 1960s policy of allowing opposing sides to have enough weapons to annihilate each other to create a stalemate was intended to give us a nervously ambiguous peace between East and West.

Today’s chessboard pitting the former Soviet-bloc superpowers against the US and its allies is, for now, commerce. And the term I’ve coined to describe the engagement is Mutually Assured Success. It has an intriguing ring of counter-intuitive logic. If both sides are successful, where’s the competition? I’m not sure. But the stakes are different, and the work at hand is compelling.

China is so heavily invested in the U.S. economy that it’s in their interest for the U.S. to succeed and give them a pay-off. And, they’re determined to bring their economy to the next plateau, from low-end manufacturing and commodities to high-end durable goods, technology, and services. We want China to excel, even if it’s at our economic peril for the short term. And the end game is market domination. Despite what is sure to become ferocious competition, we need China as much as China needs us. In fact, right now, they own us.

This year, we’ve done business in the Middle East, South Africa, India, and China. What strikes me most about this up-tick in work is, as American leadership educators, we are in such demand. The leadership methods we’ve developed and exported are now considered a standard in business schools abroad.

How can Western leadership teachers and coaches engage in emerging markets, and what do they need to make the cut? When we take our executive education curricula to China, we find a few unexpected dynamics.

International executives are commonly advised to adapt to local customs, and in the case of U.S. business people, this usually means showing more respect, restraint and humility. But if you’re teaching leadership, you can check your acquiescence at the door.

My Chinese hosts and the European program staff expressed—in so many words—that they want undiluted Western leadership. They don’t want cultural sensitivity. It’s as if they’re saying, “We’re buying you, and that’s what we want. We expect you to be your best and to teach us the way you would teach Westerners.” Of course, I’m enough of a realist to think they’re looking for where we go wrong!

Bring plenty of stamina because the days are long. Any introverts in your ranks should be prepared to get out of their comfort zone because there are equal parts of relationship building outside the classroom.

Essentially, you get to be Western all day in class—with simultaneous translation at every step of the way—but in the evening, as you get scheduled for dinners that you didn’t know you were having, socializing is expected and you end up being “teacher” over meals and drinks. There’s a lot of pressure be “on” even when you’re off. We might assume that there’s some degree of pressure from higher ups for young executives to learn all they can in any and every way they can.

History shows that Asian nations are experienced at “adapt, adopt and improve” as they emulate successful business systems and improve them to define new levels of excellence and best practices. As China adopts Western leadership methodologies, they already benefit from jumping aboard after a great deal of evolution and advancement has occurred, from command-and-control to today’s participatory styles.

This, however, raises a challenge for the average Chinese executive who has grown up under the ultimate command-and-control, that of a once closed communist state.

Still, my students, the most promising in their organizations—admittedly, mostly upper middle class—are well educated and well traveled. So their Westernization makes a more democratic workplace a little more accessible than it might be to a less advantaged Chinese citizen or even older generations within the organization.

If you’re looking to expand your leadership practice to China, consider four points:
• They want Western. Don’t give them Western lite. European education is common among most people you will teach, and they’re eager to emulate how “we” do it.
• Feedback is the one area that might be challenging, because of language and cultural differences. Have a translator for every conversation. Some instruments, like FIRO-B, have been recently translated to Mandarin.
• Prepare for long days, but expect a lot of polite curiosity about your work outside of class. They do “want Western” but Eastern social customs still compel you to socialize as an extension of business.
• Remember “lead time” doesn’t translate well in China. The population of China is so much more vast than the US or European nations. This creates a sense of there’s always someone else who can do it now. So respond fast!

As a social scientist, I’m intrigued by what the Chinese version of Western leadership will become. Will they do to our human systems of organizations what Japan did to Henry Ford’s assembly line, making a new, more nimble and facile organization? Then, maybe we can learn from them.

Mutually Assured Success should appeal to any leadership professional as a means of improving global management and securing work for all of us. But can a focus on the principles of participatory leadership and learning organizations play a role in political and social dynamics? Is leadership development a democratizing process?
Whether your interest is international business or international leadership development, watch closely, because I expect the questions will be answered soon.

We’re finishing up a busy year, as harsher than usual winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere demonstrates that even the Internet can’t dig business out of a snow bank. Nature is still a significant contributor to the ambiguity we face as executives and leaders.

Fortunately, we’ve managed to stay a few steps ahead of bad weather and made it to all engagements in Paris and the United Arab Emirates in the past few weeks.

When we’re back in the States, if you believe our newspapers of record, business seems to be hanging on what the current president will do next and, even more vexing, who will be the president after 2012. Americans have lightened up a bit since the mid-term elections, but in our anecdotal comparisons, we’re still the world’s worriers. Embracing uncertainty—will I have a job, will my flight happen, will I have to take a pay cut—can be frustrating if not harrowing. We think this is why Americans are in such a funk.

In the rest of the world, people are upbeat. They don’t seem to care about who is running government. As we’ve mentioned before, in the emerging markets where we teach, things are now relatively MORE stable and certain than ever before. Chinese executives are noticeably happy. That’s just a hunch. And as a counter-point, we’ll offer John D. Hansen, et al, writing in the Journal of Business Venturing, who inform us that:

Americans SMEs are more willing to deal with the risks associated with making investments in projects that have uncertain outcomes or unusually high profits and losses…the risk-taking dimension of EO (entrepreneurial orientation) addresses a willingness to accept and even create ambiguity, particularly the ambiguity associated with engaging in high-risk projects. The finding that American SMEs are significantly more willing to take risks when compared to SMEs from all other countries seems logical based on the fact that the U.S. ranks lowest in terms of uncertainty avoidance (Americans are more tolerant of ambiguous future returns).

Okay, so maybe we don’t try to avoid uncertainty. But on average, we’re not so happy about it.

There’s a homecoming this week that’s bringing coaches, teachers, authors, psychologists, statisticians and curriculum specialists to Greensboro, North Carolina, USA…including some of our staff.

The Center for Creative Leadership is celebrating its 40^th year of existence and current and former associates will be reacquainting at the place that not only gave many of us our start in the business of developing leaders, but also helped define an internationally recognized focus on psychologically based executive education.

Lately, we’ve been writing about trends in emerging markets outside the US. Much of this is being carried out by the Center itself and its affiliates. But also, the concepts and principles that originated at CCL are the basis for uncountable independent consultancies and some of the most respected business schools in the world.

We recognize CCL for being the knowledge center that gave a platform to hundreds of people in the development of 360 feedback, personality assessments and executive coaching, who might otherwise have had to find other endeavors. The faculty and staff of the Center benefited as much as the participants. Over half of Executive Development Group came from The Center for Creative Leadership and it’s hard to read a book or a scholarly article on executive education that doesn’t have a CCL footnote.

After the formal ceremony and some more personal gatherings, we’ll be taking it back on the road to Houston with HEC and Abu Dhabi with Duke CE.

Thank you, Center for Creative Leadership.

It’s estimated that only 30% of the Fortune 100 conduct board evaluations. A board evaluation is exactly the kind of due diligence that Senator Sarbanes and Congressman Oxley had in mind when they affixed their names to one of the most important American legislation acts of this century. The downside comes when a seriously negative evaluation obligates the board to remove a member, since the evaluation process is essentially an audit.

We’re one of a few leadership consultancies that offer this specialized service and we’ve seen it have positive results by creating more effective board organizations. The process we use is similar to our executive coaching methodology.

Since Sarbanes-Oxley doesn’t require board evaluations, but does hold firms accountable for action if they do conduct evaluations, it’s a tough sell.

But what if boards took a developmental approach to evaluations like most Executive Development Group clients? Why shouldn’t directors have the opportunity to improve their effectiveness with data through work with an executive coach to be better in their interpersonal and collaborative skills?

Marjorie Chan, writing in the Journal of Leadership, Accountability & Ethics (Nov. 2009)  surveyed 16 Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 firms…

“Neither the Sarbanes-Oxley Act nor the exchanges require the performance evaluation and removal of weak directors. It was reported that only 30% of the boards evaluate individual members (Hymowitz & Lublin, 2003). Participants were asked to express their views on this issue. All 17 interviewees agreed that board evaluations, either formal or informal, should be done. All participating organizations, except for two, conduct board evaluations on a regular basis. Three emphasized that the issue revolves around the decision with respect to what evaluation process to use rather than whether or not the boards are evaluated.”

In our experience, helping low-performing directors should be seen as a development opportunity and by developing the director toward improvement, the board demonstrates a high degree of commitment to the shareholders.