Vistage – Page 11 – Elisa K. Spain

Trust Your Gut For The No…

October 6, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Often when we are buyers, we find someone or something we like and then work to find data (experience, accomplishments, etc.) to convince ourselves why this person or this product is something we should buy.

When it comes to interviewing for key candidates, Vistage speakers, Barry Deutsch and Brad Remillard, recommend we take a more structured approach to interviewing to improve our hiring success. They recommend we start the process first by clearly defining the success factors for the role and then asking the candidate to tell us stories about how they have achieved this success in the past and how they will do it for us.

It dawned on me recently that this approach works in many (most?) situations when we are buyers. After all, when we are hiring, we are buyers.

So, am I saying no gut at all? All data? No. Absolutely, there is a gut to every decision we make, and in most situations, especially when we are buyers, trust your gut for the no. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. When hiring, it’s the behavioral questions that help us learn if a person is a cultural fit. If a person’s style, ethics or values don’t fit, it doesn’t matter if they can do the job.

When committing our time or buying a product, isn’t it really the same key question?

What are my expectations (success factors)?
What is the data that supports that my expectations will be met?
Then the gut question: How does this feel?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Go Ahead, Drop Some Balls…

September 15, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Just the other day, I was meeting with an executive acquaintance of mine who had just received a significant promotion. While he is excited about his promotion, he is challenged with looking for his replacement in his previous position; and in the meantime was doing both jobs. When I asked him how it was going, he responded, “just trying to get it all done, without dropping any balls”.

This conversation reminded me of one I had with one of my Vistage CEO Advisory Board members. He was lamenting the challenges one his executives has with burnout. In this case, the CEO was saying “I wish he would learn to drop some balls, his effort to get everything done is what is causing his burnout”!

For those of us who want to dot every I and cross every T, (I admit I am one of them), the ‘to do list’ can seem endless. What I heard this wise CEO saying is, “go ahead, drop some balls”, just choose the ones you are going to drop.

What if instead of starting each day with a list of what we are going to do, we instead begin by removing from the list the things we aren’t going to do. Here are some examples to get you started:

What if you reviewed email once or twice per day, and let everyone know that is your plan?
What if you coded your email so that critical emails moved to a priority list and you responded to these first?
What if you paused and asked yourself, does this email, call, text, inquiry require a response?
What if you removed yourself from EVERY email where you were listed as a cc (or sorted these to a “someday maybe” list).
What if you paused, before saying “yes”?

Please send me your comments with ideas to add to this list…

P.S. In honor of this post and my upcoming vacation, the next blog post will appear September 29th.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Quote: Vision Without Execution…

August 25, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

This month’s leadership quote:

Vision without execution is hallucination.

— Thomas A. Edison

When leaders focus solely on vision and strategy and not on execution, put simply, nothing gets done. Successful leaders know that a vision is a destination that their team can rally around. They also know that while the vision is their job, it is a team effort to develop a strategy for getting there.

At the same time, once the vision and strategy are defined, results only happen with implementation. And only succeed with the monitoring and evaluation that follows.

In my experience, leaders who see their only job as generating the big ideas and abdicate their leadership role when it comes to execution are suffering from the hallucinations Thomas Edison describes. By avoiding learning about the people they lead, the technologies their companies use, the customers they serve, and numerous other crucial little things, they miss the key elements of execution.

This is why Vistage members share their vision, strategy and execution plans, are accountable to each other for all three and outperform their industry peers.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Development: Not Just For Women

August 4, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership Development: Not Just for Women

As part of our leadership development, my Vistage groups frequently select a book to read as a group. Recently, my Vistage Inside group chose the book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandburg.

On the day we discussed this book in my group, the first person to speak was a man. His comment was “This is not a gender issue. This book resonated for me and the challenges I have in my career”.

This book has garnered both praise and criticism and certainly puts to rest the question of whether a book can spark a debate.

The debate centers around two issues. First, given Sheryl’s wealth and position, is she truly able to advise young women? And, is she placing too much of the onus on women who are already struggling to fulfill impossible demands, and too little on government and employers to provide better child care, more flexible jobs and other concrete gains.

Having begun my career in the 1970’s, for me the book initially was a reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same. While certainly gender neutrality has occurred in many jobs, the executive suite is one where the numbers say otherwise.

That said, I wonder, is the question really about gender neutrality or is it about the challenges that women and men face as they navigate the path to career advancement?

I wonder if the real questions that Sheryl is suggesting we, women and men, ask are:

What is the path to a “seat at the table”?
What risks must I take?
What personal choices must I make to achieve career success (i.e. choice of mate, where I live, who my friends are)?

And, finally the most key question,

What must I give up, to get what I want?

For more on this topic, see previous post, Laws of Success: Perfection of The Life or Perfection of The Work

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Quote: The Art Of Being Wise….

July 28, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

This month’s leadership quote:

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

— William Jones

How many times do we notice something, point it out and then regret it later, wishing we had kept quiet. In our quest for excellence, sometimes we forget that perfection and excellence are not the same. Excellence sometimes is simply knowing what to accept as good enough and what to overlook.

Here’s an idea…

Today, instead of looking around your office, your plant, or the long to-do list and noticing what is missing:

What if you, instead, noticed a critical item that is working and gave someone specific positive feedback?
And, decided to overlook something less important, that may not be exactly what you wanted, but is really good enough?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Vistage Confidence Index: CEO Optimism Grows In Q2 2013

July 7, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

The quarterly Vistage Confidence Index is now available.

CEOs held optimistic views about the overall economy as well as for their own firms in the Q2 2013 Vistage CEO Confidence Index. While there was a slight shift in their assessments of the economy, how CEOs viewed prospects for their own firms have been remarkably stable since the start of the year.

The Vistage CEO Confidence Index was 96.7 in the 2nd quarter 2013 survey, virtually unchanged from the 96.6 in the 1st quarter, and above the 92.8 in last year’s 2nd quarter.

Below are some key highlights from the Q2 2013 Vistage CEO Confidence Index (all members surveyed):

62% of CEOs see rising home prices as a positive sign of overall improvement in the economy.
30% of CEOs allow their staff to work from home at least one day a week.
53% of CEOs believe economic conditions in the U.S. have improved compared with a year ago, while only 33% believe conditions will improve in the next year.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership Quote: Leadership Is Not Magnetic Personality…

June 30, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Once again, I am taking a brief pause from the Leadership View series for the monthly quote. The series will return next week with Leadership View #12.

This month’s leadership quote:

Leadership is not magnetic personality — that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ — that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations — Peter F. Drucker

What a relief, this means EVERY leader has the potential to succeed…That is, if he or she wants to. For me, this quote means that to accomplish successful leadership, we must step outside of ourselves and focus on the people we are leading. We must identify what drives each individual on our team, identify their unique genius and coach them toward success. It is our job as leaders to inspire the people we lead to take the next step, to take the risk to achieve growth and as Drucker says, achieve beyond their limitations.

Perhaps the place to start is with identifying these same factors within ourselves…

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #11: Hardest Task

June 23, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #11:

Hardest task – changing your leadership and management styles as your company grows or you go up the ladder.

I often hear entrepreneurs say, “I don’t want to lose the culture as I grow this company” or “We are like a family, I want to keep this feeling as we grow”. And yet as the company grows the culture inevitably changes and the owner no longer knows the name and the family of every employee.

And, what the company needs as it moves from “go-go” to “prime” (to quote Vistage speaker Gerry Faust) is for the leader to change.

In the go-go period, everyone is equal and it is all about getting the job done, getting the orders out, meeting the customer needs. Typically the owner is the chief sales officer and innovator. And, then as a company adds more people and moves to prime, management becomes necessary and terms like “building a leadership team” come into play.

Suddenly the owner is thrust into a role of CEO and has people reporting to him or her who are focused on their own career path. These key executives want the opportunity to innovate and have an impact themselves. And, the CEO while still expected to define the vision, must also become a coach and mentor, allowing others to grow and develop as leaders.

At the same time, the folks who came to the company as experts and doers are often expected to become managers. And those that came to “manage” are expected to become leaders. The best operations manager who succeeded because he or she can implement processes must learn to think like an owner and take a broad view. These new roles and new ways of thinking require new behaviors as well.

Those that are able to change are those rare few that build and lead the less than 1% of companies >$100mm in revenue.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Leadership View #6: Some Problems Can’t Be “Solved”

May 12, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

Leadership View #6:

Some problems can’t be “solved” (and, hopefully, made to go away) – they must be managed and may require the leader’s repetitive attention and time.

As leaders and managers, we have been taught to find the root cause and fix the problem. This Leadership View seems to fly in the face of that.

What do you mean “some problems can’t be solved”?

For me the key word here is repetition. For anything to be sustainable, it must be repeated. We humans get distracted, forget what we learned and have to be reminded. This is what Vistage is all about. Our members hear from a speaker 8 times a year. Do you really think each speaker brings something new to the table? Rather, they often are reinforcing a similar message. And, we hear the message differently depending on where we are in our lives and our businesses at the time. An entrepreneur leading a start-up will hear a leadership message differently 10 years later when he or she is challenged with building a leadership team that will lead to a sustainable enterprise.

I asked one of our long term Vistage members recently if he had ever considered leaving Vistage. His answer was “never, I learn something at every meeting, every one-to-one.” He leads a highly successful, high growth business. My belief is he learns something new each time, because he comes with different ears each time.

The same is true for the people that work for us. Some problems can’t be solved, because things happen. Life isn’t static and our businesses and our processes aren’t static. Last year in a post entitled “Is Your Leadership Team Your Co-Advisor“, I talked about the DIME Method: Design, Implement, Monitor, Evaluate. For me the repetition speaks to the Monitor and Evaluate part of the continuum. As problems get solved and things change, we must monitor, evaluate and then design again.

As you mull over this idea that problems can’t be solved, I encourage you to ask yourself the following questions:

When was the last time we monitored or evaluated the systems we have in place?
Are we doing things, “because that’s the way we have always done it”?
What is the root cause of the problems that exist in my company today? Which of these require my repetitive time and attention?

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com

Vistage Confidence Index: CEO Optimism Grows In Q1 2013

April 9, 2013 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

The quarterly Vistage Confidence Index is now available.

More than 1,500 Vistage members surveyed in the Q1 2013 Vistage CEO Confidence Index reported an improved economy and brighter prospects for their own firms despite recent cutbacks in federal spending.

Similarly, small business owners who took the March WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO Survey reported growing strength in the overall economy and have become increasingly confident that their firms would continue to benefit from the ongoing economic expansion. The Vistage CEO Confidence Index was 104 in the March 2013 survey, up from 101.4 in February, reaching the highest level recorded since the survey began last June.

Below are some key highlights from the Q1 2013 Vistage CEO Confidence Index (all members surveyed):

49% of CEOs think that economic conditions have improved compared with a year ago, up from 35% in Q4 2012.
68% of CEOs anticipate their firm’s sales revenues will increase in the next 12 months.
Just 11% of CEOs found it easy to find people with the right skills to drive their business growth, while 75% found it difficult to find qualified talent.
16% of CEOs believe the sequester will adversely impact their business.
82% of CEOs expect U.S. fiscal uncertainty will continue throughout the year.

Elisa K. Spain

Elisa Spain

elisaspain.com