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.

Since co-authoring Breaking The Glass Ceiling: Can Women Reach The Top Of America’s Largest Corporations? in1987 (paperback in 1994), we’ve seen great progress in the advancement of women in business.

Last week Katrin Bennhold noted in International Herald Tribune that breaking the glass ceiling is now happening, somewhat ironically, with the examples and initiatives of men. She writes of an ambiguous landscape in gender equity:

In the early 21st century, women in the developed world find themselves in a peculiar place. With boys failing in school and working-class men losing their jobs to the economic crisis, pundits predict not just The Death of Macho (Foreign Policy, September 2009) but The End of Men (The Atlantic, July/August 2010).

Reality is more nuanced. Women earn more doctorates, but less money. They are overtaking men in the work force, but still do most housework. They make the consumer decisions but run only 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

“In theory, we now have equal rights,” sighed one senior female executive at a French multinational, who tellingly requested anonymity for fear of riling the men at her company. “In practice, we still have babies.

In the Western world, motherhood remains the barrier to gender equality…MORE”

Bennhold suggest that the more women-focused adjustments of the first wave of workplace gender equity, such as maternity leave, are vital but also reinforce the role of women as primary caregivers…caregivers who don’t get leadership positions, despite their qualifications.

Some organizations are putting the mantle of nurturer on dads by stressing the importance of paternity leave and by putting more men in charge of gender diversity as a matter of building greater awareness of sexism among the sex that still makes the most money and gets the most promotions. While we’ve seen that blatant sexism is less prevalent than it once was, male leadership still hasn’t completely grasped the fact that high-performing women are often high-performing moms who can’t invest the same levels of extra-curricular time on their careers.

In coaching and learning interventions dealing with diversity, it’s time to marshal men to balance the workplace leadership as they get back in touch with their family responsibilities.

Giving the next generation strong father figures would not only help explode the glass ceiling, it might also be the best hope for those failing boys in school who lack male role models. MORE

Drs. Randall P White and Sandra L Shullman are featured authors in the April issue of CLO Magazine. Writing on Ambiguity Leadership, Randy and Sandy advance the idea that an aptitude for ambiguity and the ability to be comfortable amidst uncertainty are traits that can be measured and developed. Also, they assert that research suggests that they are traits of high-performers. From the article:

Research done by the Executive Development Group suggests that the ability to positively manage uncertainty may be an essential trait of effective leaders, often found in those considered high potentials. Evidence shows it can be measured and learned.

Based on interviews with numerous C-level executives around the world, Elizabeth Mellon, executive director of Duke Corporate Education, said mindset — more than personality and behavior — forms an observable pattern among some of the most successful leaders and that a fearless approach to uncertainty is required.

“C-suite executives reveal a high degree of being comfortable with discomfort,” Mellon said. “They accommodate ambiguity and the uncertainty it brings. They are confident in making decisions that move their organizations into uncharted territory because they know this ensures long-term prosperity. They have ‘solid cores’ that allow them to navigate the unknown and accept not knowing everything. And they tend to have a longer view because they see time as a continuum in which uncertainty will come and go as they progress. Being uncertain doesn’t stifle them.”

Read the whole article here.

Our coaching and classroom engagements during this quarter are taking us to England, Spain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, India and South Africa. Given the United States’ role in the 2008 financial crisis, our role as AMERICAN executive development professionals gives us a little more baggage. Especially when our learners are bankers, as many of our clients are.

Dubai from space. Thanks, NASA!

It’s encouraging to note that many of the smaller banks outside of Europe and the US are finding themselves in fairly stable situations with promising opportunity, following the well-deserved dressing down (followed by an arguably undeserved bailing-out) of Western financiers. As executive coaches we’re also thrilled that financial clients around the world are investing in learning initiatives and leadership development.

Should I be surprised when the first eager question I get from an Indian executive is, “will we be covering ethics”?

Our friends at Chief Learning Officer magazine announce that their Chief Learning Officer Symposium is sold out. Let’s hear it for investments in learning.

From their press release:

Chicago, Sept. 17 — Chief Learning Officer magazine has announced that the Fall 2009 CLO Symposium, to be held Sept. 28-30 at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo., is sold out.

“At a time when many conferences and trade shows are experiencing large declines in attendance, it is particularly rewarding to see so many enterprise learning leaders turn out for the CLO Symposium,” said Norm Kamikow, president and editor in chief of Chief Learning Officer magazine. “With the economy on the upswing,” added Kamikow, “our near record attendance is a clear sign learning leaders are back to business and fully engaged.”

Excellent!

So is “learning” a leading or lagging indicator?

James Surowiecki writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker about “Status Quo Anxiety” as it relates to the US debate on health-care reform. He points to studies that show humans love what they already “own” juxtaposed to political polls that reveal Americans are simultaneously dissatisfied with their health-care services and reluctant to change in any significant way.

The academics Ziv Carmon and Dan Ariely showed the same thing in a real-world experiment: posing as ticket scalpers, they phoned people who had entered a raffle to win tickets to a Duke basketball game. People who hadn’t won tickets were willing to pay, on average, a hundred and seventy dollars to get into the game. But those who had won tickets wanted twenty-four hundred dollars to part with them. In other words, those who had, by pure luck, won the tickets thought the ducats were fourteen times as valuable as those who hadn’t.

—From “Status Quo Anxiety” by James Surowiecki,The New Yorker, August 31, 2009

Surowiecki goes on to suggest that the concept of status quo is, itself, at best tenuous. For most Americans, if you lose your job, you lose your health care insurance. The security we all cling to may not be a complete illusion, but it is definitely ambiguous.

"The Gulf Stream," Winslow Homer

Uncertainty, the natural human response to ambiguity, causes most people to look for certainty and that usually involves clinging to the familiar. But if a familiar approach hasn’t worked in the past or got us into trouble, it’s like staying with a sinking vessel.

In your work, are you willing to abandon a bad idea even though you “own it”?

Dr. Randall P White, yachtsman, in Miami regatta. Randy—evidently with a GOOD idea out front in number 42—is in the middle, sitting.

Randy White offers this audio clip on the drawbacks of strengths-based leadership in this podcast session for Training Magazine.

Training Magazine Network provides a lively social networking environment for learning executives. You may need to log in to hear the podcast.

Lily Kelly-Radford, PhD, joins Executive Development Group as a partner. Kelly-Radford will provide executive coaching and leadership development to clients worldwide, with partners Randall P. White, PhD, and Sandra L. Shullman, PhD.

Kelly-Radford is also owner of LEAP Leadership, Atlanta, a leadership consultancy focused on the entertainment and sport industries. She was previously executive vice president global markets at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). At CCL, Kelly-Radford led worldwide delivery of executive education in North America, Europe and Asia.

Lily Kelly-Radford, PhD.

“Lily joins us at a time when global and cross-cultural experience is more vital than ever in our international practice,” says Shullman, who is based in Columbus. Kelly-Radford also expands the Greensboro-headquartered Executive Development Group presence in the United States, as she is based in Atlanta.

Kelly-Radford earned a Doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of Georgia. She is licensed to practice in four states.

There are some things your best friend should tell you, so we’ll politely challenge a news release from Cambria Consulting, a firm we’ve admired for years. We wished they had asked for some outside feedback before launching their latest instrument.

The release tells us there is a new way to administer 360-degree feedback without all the bother of an objective facilitator. The product’s main benefit is time savings and a kind of batch processing that allows entire teams to be rated at one time, like “mountains of Julianne fries,” just that easy, just that quick.

From the Business Wire release:

“Using Comparative Rating, managers can evaluate their direct reports together instead of one at a time. This ability to visually compare everyone against the same performance factors not only requires 50 to 70 percent less time, it also provides more accurate assessments. Entire teams and organizations can be assessed simultaneously, with higher completion rates and without rater fatigue. This is a significant benefit to today’s busy managers who would otherwise be burdened by the cumbersome single-rater process.”

The new Cambria360 is, no doubt, a spiffy user-friendly tool. Cambria makes great products. But we wonder if the promotional message obfuscates some of the problems inherent in evaluating such large groups at once. Where is the one-on-one evaluation? As coaches and facilitators, we feel left out.

It certainly is ideally suited for the strength-based leadership movement, with its emphasis on fast results.

Speaking of strengths, the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being in Glasgow, Scotland joins us in challenging the notion of ignoring weaknesses with a review of The Perils of Accentuating the Positive. Thanks, Carol!

Dr. Randall P. White: "It's a good time to be an 'ambiguity leader.'"

We’re crossing the globe—in the last 30 days, India, England, South Africa, France…Upstate New York, Ohio and Texas—and can attest, there is a world-wide glut of talent.

One client tells us there has never had so much good talent to recruit from. The short list of candidates for top management positions looks like a C-level all-star team. Clients who have been searching for months for high level specialists are suddenly discovering ideal candidates eager to move almost anywhere.

On the other side of the desk, organizations are struggling to retain their top talent through bonuses and incentives.

Dr. Sandra L. Shullman: "It's a good time to be a recruiter."

And it’s one of those ambiguity leadership moments…no one has ever been in this position before, so the entire script of talent development is being written right now.

Training-wise, open enrollment executive education is moribund. And it may never return. At least, not as we knew it. Remember, if we can be without you for a week, we can be without you!