Accelerating Your Development as a Leader E-Book

Robert Barner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

An invaluable resource for HR professionals and executive coaches, this book focuses on how to reduce the time needed to prepare high-potential (HIPO) leaders for next-level positions. Providing the leading trends, tools, and techniques in the industry, the book demystifies the process of HIPO development. It includes a powerful five-step process for increasing leaders' readiness, as well as a complete set of tools for running workshops on developmental planning and coaching. This text also serves as a core text for the author's Executive Coaching Certificate Programs.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

About This Book

About Pfeiffer

Title page

Copyright page

Part I: PARTICIPANT’S GUIDE

PARTICIPANT’S PREFACE

Why This Book?

A Little Bit About Me

How to Use This Book

CHAPTER ONE MANAGING A COMPANY OF ONE

Put Yourself in the Driver’s Seat

Accelerated Development: Is It Possible and Desirable?

Case in Point: Letting Go of the Past

The Next Steps

CHAPTER TWO CLOSING THE GAP

Take Aim at Your Career Target

Does Your Career Target Reflect Your Priorities?

Case in Point: Tom

Keep the Big Picture in Mind

Job Demand Features: The Heart of the Crucible

Case in Point: Jamie

Your Next Steps

CHAPTER THREE BUILDING YOUR PLAN

Essentials of Good Development Planning

Case in Point: Randy

Case in Point: Mindi

Case in Point: Carlos

Case in Point: Paul

How to Leverage Your Strengths

Your Next Steps

CHAPTER FOUR LEVERAGING DEVELOPMENTAL ASSIGNMENTS

Why Developmental Assignments Often Disappoint

Selecting Developmental Assignments

Staging the Assignment

Managing the Assignment

Reviewing the Assignment

Case in Point: Ken

Your Next Steps

CHAPTER FIVE ACCELERATING YOUR LEARNING

Acceleration = Agility + Efficiency

Exploiting Available Avenues for Learning

Increasing the Efficiency of Your Learning

Case in Point: Kirk

Your Next Steps

CHAPTER SIX MANAGING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND

The Importance of Brand Distinction

You Have Your Own Personal Brand

Discovering Your Personal Brand

How to Strengthen Your Brand

Create Opportunities to Leverage Your Brand

Case in Point: Sandra

Your Next Steps

Part II: LEADER’S GUIDE

LEADER’S PREFACE

How to Make the Best Use of This Book

CHAPTER ONE THE WHAT AND THE WHY OF MANAGERIAL COACHING

The Business Case for Accelerated Development

Understanding Your Role as a Coach

CHAPTER TWO HOW TO IMPLEMENT COACHING

How to Build a Strong Coaching Relationship

CHAPTER THREE HELPING OTHERS TO IDENTIFY DEVELOPMENTAL GAPS

The Challenges Faced by Career Professionals

How You Can Help

Avoid These Coaching Pitfalls

CHAPTER FOUR HELPING OTHERS BUILD THEIR PLANS

Accelerated Development Starts with a Solid Plan

The Challenges Faced by Career Professionals

How You Can Help

Case in Point: Charlotte

Avoid These Coaching Pitfalls

CHAPTER FIVE HELPING OTHERS LEVERAGE DEVELOPMENTAL ASSIGNMENTS

The Challenges Faced by Career Professionals

How You Can Help

Avoid These Coaching Pitfalls

CHAPTER SIX HELPING OTHERS ACCELERATE ON-THE-JOB LEARNING

Building Learning-Agile Leaders

The Challenges Faced by Career Professionals

Case in Point: Carol

How You Can Help

Avoid These Coaching Pitfalls

CHAPTER SEVEN COACHING OTHERS ON BRAND MANAGEMENT

What a Personal Brand Communicates

The Challenges Faced by Career Professionals

How You Can Help

Case in Point: Jessica

Avoid These Coaching Pitfalls

Case in Point: Tony

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Index

Pfeiffer Publications Guide

FORMATS

METHODOLOGIES

TOPICS

What will you find on pfeiffer.com?

About This Book

Why is this topic important?

Although many books have been written on the subjects of executive coaching and leadership development, none has focused on the challenge of how to reduce the time needed to prepare leaders for next-level positions. At the same time, organizations are beginning to realize how much the lack of good leadership talent within their pipelines poses a critical bottleneck to continued growth. Until now, this topic hasn’t been effectively addressed. While organizational leaders often participate in formal development and training programs, they frequently lack the tools they need for taking charge of their own development. In the same way, managers are held accountable for the development and retention of their people, yet are often placed in a “sink or swim” position by not being given adequate training for making this happen. For their part, many HR and OD leaders are struggling to figure out ways to develop their organizational leaders despite the lack of time and resources. This book attempts to meet these needs by providing leaders and their managers with a self-directed development toolkit that they can use for accelerating leadership development on the job and become better prepared to tackle broader leadership responsibilities within their organizations. There is no magic here—only an organized and systematic plan of attack that encompasses all developmental steps, from initial goal setting to personal brand management.

What can the reader achieve with this book?

This book has been written for several audiences. If you are a leader who wants to advance your own career while strengthening your performance, then you will find that this book can help you in a number of ways. It will show you how to construct well-focused development goals, how to enlist your manager as a partner in your development, how to convert job assignments into developmental opportunities, and how to strengthen your own personal “brand label” as a professional. If you are a manager, you will learn how to coach and assist your team members at each stage of their development process, how to convert job assignments into developmental opportunities, and how to stage feedback and coaching conversations in a way that supports good work relationships.

If you are a learning and development, OD, or HR leader, then you’ll find that this book can serve as an excellent learning resource for conducting workshops on leadership development, or for supplementing your leadership coaching programs. [For additional assistance, feel free to reach me through the contact information provided in the back of this book and I’ll be happy to talk to you about the workshops that I run on the subject of accelerated leadership development.] Finally, if you are a university instructor or private consultant who conducts coaching certification programs, I believe that you will find this book to be a good supplemental resource to your own program materials. I am currently using this book myself in the coaching certification program that I teach for students at Southern Methodist University.

How is the book organized?

This book is comprised of two parts; a Participant’s Guide and a Manager’s Guide. If you are focused on accelerating your own development as a leader, then you will want to spend all of your time working through the Participant’s Guide. Each section of this guide provides detailed guidelines and exercises for establishing development goals, translating those goals into a viable action plan, and overcoming frequently encountered barriers to personal development. If you are a manager who is attempting to accelerate the development of your team members, then you will want to follow up your completion of the Participant’s Guide with a careful review of the Manager’s Guide. The Manager’s Guide provides suggestions for supporting leader development at each stage of the process, from helping team members to prepare for developmental job assignments to guidelines for providing feedback and career guidance. Each chapter also identifies some of the most common pitfalls that managers are likely to encounter at each stage of the development process and steps you can take to avoid or minimize them.

About Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer serves the professional development and hands-on resource needs of training and human resource practitioners and gives them products to do their jobs better. We deliver proven ideas and solutions from experts in HR development and HR management, and we offer effective and customizable tools to improve workplace performance. From novice to seasoned professional, Pfeiffer is the source you can trust to make yourself and your organization more successful.

Essential Knowledge Pfeiffer produces insightful, practical, and comprehensive materials on topics that matter the most to training and HR professionals. Our Essential Knowledge resources translate the expertise of seasoned professionals into practical, how-to guidance on critical workplace issues and problems. These resources are supported by case studies, worksheets, and job aids and are frequently supplemented with CD-ROMs, websites, and other means of making the content easier to read, understand, and use.

Essential Tools Pfeiffer’s Essential Tools resources save time and expense by offering proven, ready-to-use materials—including exercises, activities, games, instruments, and assessments—for use during a training or team-learning event. These resources are frequently offered in looseleaf or CD-ROM format to facilitate copying and customization of the material.

Pfeiffer also recognizes the remarkable power of new technologies in expanding the reach and effectiveness of training. While e-hype has often created whizbang solutions in search of a problem, we are dedicated to bringing convenience and enhancements to proven training solutions. All our e-tools comply with rigorous functionality standards. The most appropriate technology wrapped around essential content yields the perfect solution for today’s on-the-go trainers and human resource professionals.

Essential resources for training and HR professionals

Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barner, Robert (Robert W.)

Accelerating your development as a leader : a guide for leaders and their managers / Robert Barner.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-59364-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-470-93701-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-93703-7 (ebk)

 1. Leadership. 2. Personal coaching. 3. Executive coaching. 4. Management. I. Title.

HD57.7.B36647 2011

658.4′092–dc22

2010043314

Acquiring Editor: Matthew Davis

Marketing Manager: Brian Grimm

Editorial Assistant: Lindsay Morton

Production Editor: Michael Kay

Editor: Rebecca Taff

Manufacturing Supervisor: Becky Morgan

Part I: PARTICIPANT’S GUIDE

PARTICIPANT’S PREFACE

Why This Book?

I was motivated to write this book for the same reason that I have written five previous business books, namely that I tend to get frustrated when I’m looking through hundreds of titles on a given topic and I cannot find what I’m looking for. In this case the topic area was high-potential development, particularly those actions and tactics that can be used to reduce development time for exceptional performers, while better preparing them for next-level assignments.

Unfortunately, what I found was that, while many books have been written on the subjects of executive coaching and leadership development, none has focused on the subject of how to reduce the time needed to prepare high-potential leaders for next-level positions. That’s a shame, since leaders who are thrown into HIPO pools are often given few tools to support their development, with the exception of a few formal leadership development workshops. In the same way, managers who are expected to coach and sponsor these high-potential leaders are seldom adequately prepared to meet this challenge. They are held accountable for the development and retention of their people, yet placed in a “sink or swim” position for making this happen. As for executives and HR leaders, they want to understand the leading trends, tools, and techniques that guide their industry. That’s especially true for the many HR generalists and leadership development professionals who are attempting to quickly graft on the skills of OD and talent management as a way of taking on broader roles in their organization.

So having waited around (less than patiently, I’m afraid) for someone to put together book that focuses on the subject of high-potential development and coming up short, I decided to write one myself.

A Little Bit About Me

So what are my qualifications for writing this book? Well, for a start, I like to think that I represent a good balance between applied practice and academic scholarship. As a practitioner I have worked in the fields of organization and leadership development for more than thirty years and have spent fifteen of those years holding the top OD/LD position for six different companies. That means I have managed talent reviews and succession plans, have formed, managed, and coached high-potential leaders, and have also hired (and occasionally fired) executive coaches. I currently work as a management consultant, specializing in the areas of talent management and high-potential coaching, a consultancy practice in which I spent several years at an earlier part of my career.

On the scholarly/academic side, I hold a doctorate in human and organizational development from Fielding Graduate University and am currently a university instructor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. As part of my academic responsibilities, I created and currently direct a coaching certification program for our university, which has focus areas in the subjects of coaching assessment as well as transitional, developmental, and performance coaching. More than two hundred individuals have completed the program since its inception over three years ago.

The five previous books that I have written on leadership development, team building, and talent management have been translated into three foreign languages for distribution throughout the UK, Europe, Scandinavia, and India. I have also written chapters for seven texts, and I have written more than thirty articles for leading trade and academic journals. Apart from my writing, I have presented on the subjects of leadership development and executive coaching at a number of inter­national conferences, including those sponsored by The American Society for Training and Development, The Society for Human Resource Management, the National OD Network, and the International Forum for Visual Facilitators.

I mention these facts because I want you to understand that I have stepped up and tested out a lot of what you’ll read about in this book with those professional business and academic learning communities with which I am involved. In short, I have thought carefully about both the theory and conceptual framework that forms the contents of this book and have successfully applied those concepts within a number of business settings, ranging from engineering to media, insurance, and hotel franchising. After thirty years in this field, I continue to enjoy my work, since I’m a firm believer in the concept of life-long learning.

How to Use This Book

If you are a leader who wants to advance your own career and strengthen your performance, then I would encourage you to take the time to complete the action steps that I have placed in each chapter before advancing to the next chapter. My reason for suggesting this is that a book on leadership development is a bit like a book on exercise or dieting, in that it is really difficult to change any area of your life simply by reading about innovative change techniques. The hard part is that you actually have to put these ideas into practice. If you are using this book as a self-study guide, then I would recommend that you purchase a second copy for your manager, since the second part of this book provides a number of guidelines and suggestions for the steps managers can take to support the development of their team members. Another option is to find a peer or associate who would be willing to serve as troubleshooter and sounding board as you formulate and implement your development plan.

If you are a manager, you can use this book to help you coach and develop your people. I would recommend that you start off by working your way through the first part of this book and apply the ideas that you will find there to support your own professional development. Once you have accomplished this, proceed to the second half of the book, the Leader’s Guide, and read about the steps you can take to support your team members’ development process.

There are three reasons why I suggest this approach. First, by going through the exercises yourself, you might be able to gain something of personal value. Second, you will also gain a better feel for the concepts and guidelines that I will be introducing to your team members. Finally, if your team members know that you are actively engaged in your own development, they will be more likely to model your approach and apply these new ideas to their own development.

If you are a leader in learning and development (L&D), OD, or HR, then you will find that this book can serve as an excellent learning resource for conducting a workshop on leadership development. If you want something more extensive, feel free to reach me through the contact information provided in the back of this book and I will be happy to talk to you about the workshops that I run on this topic.

Finally, if you are a university instructor or private consultant who conducts coaching certification classes, you might also want to consider using this text as a supplemental resource to your own program materials. I am currently using this book myself within the coaching certification program that I teach at Southern Methodist University.

That’s about it. If, after reading it, you have any questions or want to find out a little bit more about my approach to executive coaching, my contact information is provided in the back flap. Enjoy!

CHAPTER ONE

MANAGING A COMPANY OF ONE

Put Yourself in the Driver’s Seat

If there’s one thing that our increasingly volatile business environment has taught us, it is that the future is unpredictable. Simply speaking, I know of no organization these days that operates under the stable-state conditions that allow for the creation of reliable career paths. Faced with uncertain business conditions and a competitive field that seems to change on a daily basis, companies are trying to keep pace with these changes by continually adapting their organizational structures, leadership roles, and key business processes. The by-product of these changes is that we’ve reached a point at which it is a bit unrealistic, if not naïve, for anyone to expect that his or her employer will able to provide a reliable roadmap to advancement and career fulfillment. Instead, it is up to each of us to take the initiative to self-manage our own development as professionals and organizational leaders. This book lays out a simple, coherent approach you can use to jump-start your career and accelerate your development as a leader, while avoiding common (and often painful) missteps.

Now, in asking you to slide into the driver’s seat I am not suggesting that your manager, HR department, and senior executives don’t care about your growth as a professional—far from it. What I am saying is that there are several reasons why you benefit when you take the lead in directing your own development:

1. You are the expert on you. As helpful as other people want to be, the simple fact is that you know yourself better than anyone else does. As we’ll discuss in the following chapters, your organizational stakeholders do play important roles as guides and advisors. They can keep you informed of important business developments that could affect the shape and structure of your organization, provide you with a fuller picture of your organization’s changing expectations of its leaders, or alert you to development opportunities that might lie outside of your immediate job function. At the same time, it is a little unrealistic to think that your managers or HR leaders possess your level of insight when it comes to understanding such things as what provides you with satisfaction and meaning in a career or the types of work/life tradeoffs that you are willing to make to pursue a challenging developmental or promotional opportunity. In other words, as you continue along your career journey your managers and HR leaders can provide useful travel directions and help you anticipate those bumps that may lie hidden along the road. What they cannot do is tell you the direction in which you should head; that is your responsibility. So an important part of taking charge of your development is learning how to clearly identify, define, and communicate to your key organizational stakeholders what is most important to you in meeting your development needs.