Category: Political Competence

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Leadership On the Edge Managerial Competence Political Competence

Women in Leadership Spotlight: Sheryl Sandberg

In recent years, the name Sheryl Sandberg has appeared frequently on lists such as: “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” by Fortune, “50 Women to Watch” by The Wall Street Journal, “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women” by Forbes, and “100 Most Influential People in the World” by Time.

A former graduate of Harvard Business School and current Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Inc., Ms. Sandberg is a prominent face representing women in leadership. She has spoken on the topic at venues such as Barnard’s Commencement address in May 2011 and Harvard Business School’s commencement this past May. Her speech “Why we have too few Women Leaders” given at a TED conference, has over one million online views, indicative that people are listening to her inspiring words.

Indeed inspiration and encouragement seem to be the qualities that distinguish Sandberg’s approach to increasing women in the workforce. This contrasts with many discussions of women and leadership that strongly critique institutional flaws and outside causes of the gender gap in leadership.

Essentially, Sandberg does not disagree with any of the systemic problems that exist. However, she primarily focuses her discussion on what women should actively do at an individual level to reach the highest rungs of leadership and management.

Her speeches include three key pieces of advice to women: 1) Sit at the table, 2) Make your partner a partner, and 3) Don’t leave until you have to leave. She implies that each of these three actions has important implications for women’s ultimate career trajectories.

For example, telling women to sit at the table stems from years of witnessing first-hand that women tend to sit on the side of the room. She believes this represents the tendency of women to systematically underestimate their own abilities, compared to men who overestimate it. This psychological barrier prevents women from getting promotions, negotiating their salaries, and ultimately owning their own success.

When Sandberg talks about “making your partner a partner,” she refers to women having to create an equitable relationship with their spouse so that the burdens of home life and family life are evenly shared. Only in such relationships can women and their spouses be allowed to invest equal time and energy into their career developments.

Finally, Sandberg’s third piece of advice again hinges on frequent psychological tendencies of women. Women prematurely worry about their future work-life balance and self-select themselves out of opportunities before such sacrifices need to be made. Examples include women who opt out of intense medical fellowships during medical school, or women who decide not to try for partner after years of work in a law firm. She warns that premature worries become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If later women struggle with work-life balance, all their forsaken opportunities deter them from selecting work over other life activities.

Sandberg’s approach to closing the leadership gap stems from an internal impetus for women to close the ambition gap. She urges all women to take on compelling projects, embrace advancement opportunities, and enrich themselves in the fields most appealing to them. Women must feel challenged and passionate about what they do, otherwise they will drop out of the workforce feeling bored and undervalued.

Studies clearly show that women have everything it takes to become successful leaders. But maybe Sandberg is on to something. Before they can change the system, perhaps women have to change their actions first.

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BLG Leadership Insights Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Why Can’t Good People Get Jobs?

A recent interview between the Wall Street Journal and Wharton Business School’s Director of Management Peter Cappelli discussed his new book Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs. Over the scope of this short interview, he discussed his take on the perceived gap between employers who claim there is a lack of qualified candidates for jobs, and candidates who question why they have been struggling to land jobs they’ve applied to.

His main take on the disconnect underlying this issue is a lack of employers wanting to train prospective job candidates. Presumably, employers are having more difficulty in hiring candidates not because there are less academically qualified people in the market, but because companies are seeking to fill open job roles only with candidates who already have highly similar work experience in very similar companies. Essentially, companies want to do what he describes as “plug and play.”

Additionally, as companies add elaborate prerequisites that they expect candidates to already have, they render it vastly difficult for candidates who have only the academic background or have been unemployed for some time from getting a fair chance at being considered. Coupled with increased reliance on Human Resources application systems that filter out candidates based on resume terminology and selective filters, many capable candidates feel kicked to the curb.

To hear more about what Peter Cappelli thinks are the main three problems that companies and candidates should address to diminish the hiring gap, check out the interview.

Is their good news if we buy into Mr. Cappelli’s view? At least then we can be relieved that the symptom is not the diagnoses. Not facing a true “talent shortage” crisis, we can hope that a better matching of good candidates with open jobs will be efficiently achieved with a bit of targeted restructuring of the hiring process!

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BLG Leadership Insights Managerial Competence Political Competence

What Happened to all the Executive M.B.A.s?

Executive M.B.A. programs have been growing in popularity in the United States since its inception at the University of Chicago in 1943. Traditionally, they have been used by companies to advance promising internal employees whom they want to develop into their future leaders.

Over the past several decades, it was quite popular for a company to identify pools of “rising talent” and sponsor them as candidates for Executive M.B.A. degrees at various higher level educational institutions. If candidates were admitted to the program, a tripartite relationship would be established between the sponsoring employer, the prospective student, and the university.

For a while, the benefits of an executive M.B.A. have seemed quite clear. Employees can continue working in their present organizations while obtaining a degree similar to an M.B.A. at a fraction of the normal cost and time. Additionally, the practical skills they attain from the program can be applied to their positions immediately as well as after program completion.

Subsequent to completing the degree, employees aim to rise faster within their organizations and increase their salaries. Likewise, many companies are content sponsoring employees who return to the company with increased loyalty, thereby helping the company with long-term succession planning. The degree has thus served as a promising strategy for leadership development and retention.

However, a recent article from the Wall Street Journal highlights changes in sponsorship trends for executive M.B.A. programs. With tighter budgets companies have been cutting back their investments in educational sponsorship. This results in more students taking it upon themselves to finance their executive M.B.A. educations, leading to more mixed outcomes upon program completion.

According to a survey of about 290 member schools by the Executive M.B.A. Council, only 27% of executive M.B.A. students received full financial sponsorship from their employers last year, down from 34% in 2007. In response to fewer sponsorships, more and more students are using career services offered by their schools in order to open alternate doors for them, rather than simply returning to their previous or current companies.

In response to increasing demand, many schools are offering greater career-coaching services to assist their executive M.B.A. students find new job opportunities. The article sites The Anderson School of Management at UCLA and the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University as prime examples of schools that have invested in personalized coaching services.

But does the decrease in executive M.B.A. sponsorships and the emergence of more career-coaching programs indicate a trend we should be concerned with?

While such trends could seem indicative of companies being less interested in investing in their own human capital, the answer to this question really depends on what glasses you are wearing. From the vantage point of companies, it could just be that they have not found executive M.B.A. degrees quite as useful in practice as they seemed in theory. From the perspective of schools, it could be that they are simply responding to students who have been urging for them to provide more options of post-graduate work. Or students may now be more are willing to finance their own degrees knowing that they will be less obligated to return to a previous employer. The best we can do for now is to keep a keen eye on the trajectories of our most recent executive M.B.A students to see what paths they follow.

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BLG Leadership Insights Managerial Competence Political Competence

How Do You Organize a Leadership Training Program?

Yesterday Professor Samuel Bacharach’s article, Unbundling Leadership, was published on TrainingIndustry.com.

The article lays out a leadership training strategy that targets high-potential employees and ensures their future leadership success.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“In selecting a leadership program that is relevant for your organization, you want to make sure that:

– The leadership construct is presented as specific trainable skills.
– The training vocabulary is integrated with the business function.
– There is a serious partnership with the top leadership team.
– A networking training cohort is created to ensure follow-through.”

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Managerial Competence Political Competence

Sonnet 94 & Leadership

Leaders are defined by their deeds, not their words. Everyone is capable of coming up with a vision, a set of goals, or a decent idea, but not everyone is up to getting things done.

Shakespeare said as much in sonnet 94.

In the first eight lines of the sonnet Shakespeare says that a person who has the power to move others, but resists temptations will “inherit heaven’s graces.” These people are the “lords and owners of their faces.”

Those that don’t wield their power to hurt or to brag can expect to benefit.

The remaining lines of the sonnet describe a summer flower. If the flower were to meet a “base infection”, Shakespeare states, it would smell worse than a weed. The moral of the sonnet: deeds shape a person’s character, regardless of their position.

Leaders know that their actions define who they are, but it’s an easily forgotten lesson in the day-to-day rush.

Literary critic Harold Bloom argues that in order to truly know a poem, one should memorize it. Leaders should commit the following sonnet to memory so they can not only internalize it’s important argument, but also feel it.

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.