Articles

This special edition of Leadership Excellence magazine features the following articles from the Knightsbridge's Leadership Solutions Team and Brian Flanagan, Director of North American Talent at Mars, Inc.:

• Turning Points: Leadership face four of the them by Dr. Vince Molinaro
• Leadership Mindset: Tackle this matter first by Tammy Heermann
• Global Leaders: We develop them at Mars, Inc. by Brian Flanagan
• Ready to Lead? Insights for emerging leaders by Tammy Heermann and Lisa Langley
• Frontline Leaders: They need to know the essentials by Alex Vincent and Tammy Heermann
• Middle Managers: Yes, you do have an impact by Tammy Heermann and Brian Wellman
• Lead the Future: It’s the executive obligation by Dr. Vince Molinaro and Tammy Heermann
• Fundamentals: It’s time to get back to them by Lisa Langley and Celia Fernandes

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In a resource-constrained world, many organizations have chosen to bet all their chips on high-potential leaders (HiPos),but the gamble appears to have paid lackluster returns. After a decade of investment, we are now seeing articles defending the “B player.” Were organizations misguided in this key investment?

PricewaterhouseCooper’s 2012 survey of CEOs from around the world shows that more than half of CEOs are concerned about their ability to access talent with the specialized skills their companies need. And according to “How to Hang On to Your High Potentials” by Claudio Fernandex-Araoz and colleagues, in the regions where many companies are focusing on growth strategies, the supply of experienced managers is most limited and the shortage is expected to continue for another two decades.

Focusing on the development and retention of HiPos continues to be a strategic imperative for organizations. To help  determine where the investment in their development has gone wrong, we went directly to the source, and spoke with HiPos themselves, as well as the chief talent officers (CTOs) in charge of these programs.

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Teams are too important to just throw a few people together, send them rock climbing and hope for the best. Instead, we need to do the hard work of creating vital teams, through team effectiveness.

The Knightsbridge Vital Teams™ approach is a comprehensive method for enhancing the performance of the most important teams in an organization. It is for teams who want more than a fun day together. It is for teams who feel that, to become really high performing, it is time to align around their purpose, understand how to build a better dynamic, and tackle head on the ailments that are holding them back from effectiveness.

This ebook by Dr Liane Davey outlines the Vital Teams™ approach. The book also includes a Team Diagnostic to get you started.

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Most team members are far too quick to blame their team’s dysfunction on others and far too slow to identify how they can make the team healthier. You could sit and wait for someone else to make it better, but you might wait forever. If you want to improve your life at work, you have the power to make your team more effective.

In this eBook, Dr. Liane Davey will help you discover how to initiate profound change in a team. It starts by learning how to change yourself. Included in this book is a Personal Action Plan to help you start that change.

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Dr. Liane Davey has been researching and working to repair team dynamics for more than 15 years. She has worked with teams from a wide range of industries and has tackled a lot of different problems. Liane has noticed some common themes and refers to them as the five diseases of teams.

It’s possible that your team has a full-blown case of one of these diseases – that the level of toxicity is obvious to all. But maybe you are only starting to see the tell-tale signs that a problem is brewing. Or maybe your team meetings feel pretty good and it won’t be until you read about the less obvious dysfunctions that you’ll become concerned.

In this book Liane outlines the five diseases and provides a diagnostic tool so that you can evaluate the health of your own team.

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Leadership, and more specifically leadership culture, has become the only real differentiator between the organizations that thrive and those that fall behind.

Unfortunately, most companies still underestimate the importance of leadership. We have many leaders today who just signed up for a leadership position to get the promotion, the higher salary, the power, the perks, without truly understanding the terms and conditions of the leadership contract.

As we look to the future, it is critical that leaders get clear on what the leadership contract is, what are its terms and conditions and reflect on whether they are really ready to sign their name to that contract. That’s what The Leadership Contract by Vince Molinaro is all about.

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Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions in partnership with BNN, Torys LLP, Global Governance Advisors, and the National/Financial Post is pleased to announce the 2012 Finalists for Canada’s Passion Capitalists awards program.

Based on the best-selling book Passion Capital by Paul Alofs, Canada’s Passion Capital is a national awards program that celebrates Canadian organizations who achieved long-term success by creating Passion Capital; the energy, intensity, and sustainability needed to generate superior results.

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Although the skill set of a good leader is the same for men and women, barriers for female leaders are still in place.

Although the skill set of a good leader is the same for men and women, it's likely that women still need some specific attention when it comes to positioning themselves for leadership opportunities.

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Women executives who have navigated the ups and downs of corporate leadership are now increasingly opting to take a detour off the fast track or being derailed by downsizings - is asking what's next terrifying or terrific?

As a career consultant, I've worked with many executive women; some take the chance to try something completely new, while others feel they want to continue in leadership roles within the corporate, government or not-for-proft sectors. How do these women face the challenge of looking for that next role?

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What is leadership? And is it worth dying for?

These are two questions that I had to ask myself very early in my career.

My first full-time job after university was with a large public sector organization. The organization did important work – helping some of the neediest people in society improve their lives by getting back to school or find a job.

However, what I immediately noticed was that the day-to-day climate at work was bland and extremely dull.

The employees, while dedicated to their clients, would show up at 8:30 a.m. in the morning and leave exactly at 5:00 p.m. sharp every single day. It seemed that they had little reason to put in more effort.

The managers appeared to be decent individuals, but they were administrators of policies and procedures in a bureaucratic organization. They did what they were told – respected the hierarchy and their place in it. There was little inspiration coming from them.

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As soon as they crawled out of their collective cradle, boomers began changing just about everything they touched—politics, technology, business, music,concepts of justice, parenting—the list is endless. Now the earliest boomers have reached age 65, and they’re set to change retirement.

In April 2011, Knightsbridge convened a focus group of human resource leaders from a dozen of Canada’s largest companies to discuss retirement in the twenty-first century.

This paper combines findings from the focus group with additional research. In developing the paper we’ve adopted a new word: Pretirement. We can’t claim to have invented pretirement, but we do find it useful for defining that period of life between traditional career and traditional retirement.

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As a director, you know that human capital is your organization’s greatest asset: the key to providing competitive advantage and driving performance. And yet, do you know who your next CEO will be, and whether there is someone within your organization who might fill that role?

A new study authored by Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions and the Clarkson Centre for Board Effectiveness (CCBE), in partnership with the Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD) – many Canadian boards are operating without basic information about their human capital assets, often because they cannot see beyond the current CEO. This is a blind spot that can create many problems, including an impairment of succession planning and even the loss of top talent.

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If you are in search of a productivity boost, people and process are the two main areas most organizations study. But which one is likely to give you the biggest bang for your buck?

Having the right person in the right job is, of course, critically important to improving output. On the other hand, the way your employees perform their work and the technology used to aid them in this endeavor is also an important element. 

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