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Leadership

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LEADERSHIP TIPS
“The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)

Don't assume that past success is a predictor of future success.

As Chief Executive Officer (CEO), an executive will face a whole new set of personalities and conditions.

Investigate a candidate's integrity and interpersonal skills as part of a thorough background check. Conduct extensive and confidential discussions with former associates.
In interviews, ask candidates how they have handled setbacks and challenges in the past, as well as personal interactions.
In examining the course of a candidate's promotions, pay close attention to how the candidate reacted when given new responsibilities that significantly increased his or her power.
Determine how much of an executive's career success has been based on favorable economic and industry conditions and the support of colleagues, and how much has been based on the executive's individual efforts. Pay close attention to how candidates performed when industry conditions were bad. Note: bad industry conditions are an excellent time to build market share.
Each finalist for the CEO position should be provided with a detailed job preview.
Be clear about ethics. Provide as much information as possible to finalists about how the board expects shareholders, employees, customers and other stakeholders to be treated.
Offer the new CEO a reasonable compensation package. Once the CEO has demonstrated a high level of competency and integrity, the compensation package can be improved.

It's easy to spot a bad CEO once the damage is done but spotting flaws before hiring can reduce the likelihood of hiring a dysfunctional leader.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2007

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have always struggled to justify their existence.

Jeff Jones, who was the chief marketing officer at Gap for two years before leaving to run ad agency McKinney, says he discussed 22 CMO positions over five months. Not one, he says, spelled out coherently what he would be accountable for. CMOs last 26 months on average these days, says recruiter Spencer Stuart, vs. 44 months for CEOs.

"CMOs are expected to deliver instant results," says Mark Jarvis, Dell's CMO since October. "It makes for a deadly cocktail of high expectations, resistance, and complexity." The CMO job is a lot more complicated and arduous than it was just a few years ago. And that, say recruiters and CMOs, helps explain the high turnover.

Building a brand is a long-term process that requires patience and incremental change. But CEOs operate at a time when investors fixate on quarterly or monthly results as never before. Corporate bean counters, who have long deemed marketing a squishy discipline, increasingly are demanding data to prove that a CMO's strategy is valid.

Few chief marketers understand the importance of being accountable more than James Farley. When he left Toyota Motor recently and joined Ford as global CMO, Farley knew he'd probably fail if his job had no hard connection to monthly sales--every automaker's report card. He also understood that Ford's regional operating chiefs might fight global marketing strategies from a CMO with no skin in the game. So Farley asked CEO Alan Mulally to give him responsibility for sales in the company's most difficult market, the U.S. That way, he'd be in the same pressure cooker as his peers. Now, when Farley tries to globalize the Ford brand strategy, he'll have more credibility. "Being accountable for sales in the U.S.," says Mulally, "will make the team tighter."