90th Percentile Leadership: Insights. Backed by Data.

Kevin Wilde, author of Coachability: The Leadership Superpower, joins us to discuss the research on coachability. During his time as CLO at Fortune 500 companies, he saw a lot of career derailment and wanted to understand WHY and HOW it could happen to even the best leaders. His book was originally going to be about career derailment. But he realized that’s just reporting on the accident. He wanted to show leaders how to avoid the accident, and the answer was really quite simple: coachability.

REGISTER for WEBINAR—Coachability: The Foundation Skill for ALL Development. 

Guest Bio

Kevin Wilde is an Executive Leadership Fellow at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. In 2015, he concluded a 34-year corporate career in leadership and talent development at General Electric and General Mills. In 2007, Chief Learning Officer magazine selected Kevin as CLO of the year.

His writing for Talent Management magazine received a national award for editorial excellence from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. His work has also been published in over a dozen books, including Coaching For Leadership, the Pfeiffer Annual on Leadership Development, and Forward-Focused Learning. In 2022, Kevin authored Coachability: The New Leadership Superpower.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

The post Episode 112: Why Coachability is the Leadership Superpower first appeared on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

The post Episode 112: Why Coachability is the Leadership Superpower appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

If you have ever been lost while driving in a car, your natural reaction is to slow down. When we are uncertain about which direction to head, our natural response is to slow down, look at a map, ask questions, and proceed cautiously forward. We have measured resilience and confidence for several years and noticed a significant decline since the pandemic. The combination of uncertainty and lack of control has increased anxiety and stress. Is slowing down a problem? In this episode, we’re looking at how increasing our resilience will help pick up the steady pace we may have lost as we navigated through the many challenges over the past few years.

Take the LEADERSHIP SPEED ASSESSMENT.

In a leadership resiliency study, we examined data from over 110,000 leaders. We measured their resilience with an eight-item index and evaluated their speed. This study revealed that as a leader’s resilience lowers, so does their speed.

Organizations can only move as fast as their employees, and even more important is the pace of a leader. Leaders who resist a brisk pace can be a major source of a company’s problems and failure.

Are you willing to try something new even if it might fail? You can let perfect be the enemy of good. If you’re going to experiment, be flexible.

Clear vision and direction make it easier to act with speed and avoid costly detours.

Moving fast gives others confidence that they can move quickly and deliver results.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and talk about their latest leadership development research. Find out more information and register here.

Feeling Sluggish at Work? 8 Ways to Improve Your Resilience by Increasing Your Speed— Article by Joe Folkman

The post Episode 111: Leadership Speed—How to Accelerate Successful Execution first appeared on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

The post Episode 111: Leadership Speed—How to Accelerate Successful Execution appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Most of us begin a new position with energy and a desire to impress. Our effort is high. Our passion is infectious. Our enthusiasm helps us to excel quickly.

But for some, work becomes mundane and repetitive. They lose some of their passion, and their work can begin to feel like a chore. Eventually, some of those executives who had initially loved their careers enter the dimension we call the “day prison.” As they enter their workspace, they feel the metaphorical bars close around them in a zone where they are unmotivated, dissatisfied, and much less productive than they could be. In this podcast, we are looking at what happens to leaders when they are in a job rut and how to get out of it.

Register for Webinar— External and Customer-Focused Leaders.

• We examined data from 970 such people in a single organization. They were between 35 and 44 years old (the typical range for the onset of a mid-career crisis), and they all rated their engagement at work in the bottom 10%.

You can try to pull yourself out of the career ditch by shifting the burden from blaming the organization to raising the bar on your own efforts. If the organization won’t help you do it, use your own initiative.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

Watch Our For Your 5-Year Job Anniversary— Article by Joe Folkman and Jack Zenger

The post Episode 110: Watch Out For Your 5-Year Workiversary first appeared on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

The post Episode 110: Watch Out For Your 5-Year Workiversary appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Have you ever been on the phone for an hour with customer service, and once you finally get to talk to a human to resolve your issue, they only say: “I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” And it’s true; they can’t. They don’t have the power or authority to resolve the problem. It’s frustrating to both the employee and the customer. So, what impact does a leader have on customer experience? A lot. In this episode, we look at seven of the most valuable capabilities leaders can utilize to influence customer satisfaction.

Register for Webinar— External and Customer-Focused Leaders.

• Customer expectations go up every year, and the challenge of getting and satisfying customers is a primary focus in most organizations.

Collaboration and Cooperation. What customers want is an organization where people work well together and cooperate. Organizations with internal conflicts and disagreements often frustrate customers and create difficulties.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

How Leaders Influence the Customer Experience— Article by Joe Folkman

The post Episode 108: How Leaders Focus Externally to Improve the Customer Experience first appeared on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Occasionally, people read articles about the best approaches to giving and receiving feedback and may think, “That all sounds great, but what do the most effective leaders actually do?”

To answer that question, we combined a self-assessment measuring feedback preference with 360-degree evaluations of leaders to discover the common attitudes of the best leaders about feedback.

In this episode, we invite you to challenge your biases and attitude about feedback and see what you can change to be more effective.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

10 Attitude about Feedback from the Most Effective Leaders— Article by Joe Folkman

The post Episode 107: 10 Attitudes About Feedback From The Most Effective Leaders appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Some of the most challenging relationships we have to learn to manage in this life are the ones we have with our co-workers. Because we spend a lot of time with them, probably even more time than friends, and we don’t always get to choose who we work with. Amy Gallo is a workplace expert, bestselling author, contributing Editor at Harvard Business Review, and Host of the Women at Work Podcast by HBR. She has researched and written a lot about resolving conflict and building relationships with work, and she found that while people agreed with what she discovered about getting along at work, they often followed up with, “ yes, but there is this ONE co-worker…” So, her newest book, Getting Along, is about dealing with those people and maybe discovering if you may be one of them. In this podcast, she discusses with us why work relationships really matter, as well as the compassion, encouragement, and tools you need to prevail—on your terms.

Check out her book Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People)!

Guest BioAmy Gallo is a workplace expert who writes and speaks about gender, interpersonal dynamics, difficult conversations, feedback, and effective communication. She is the author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People) and the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict, as well as hundreds of articles for Harvard Business Review. For the past three years, Amy has co-hosted HBR’s popular Women at Work podcast, which examines the struggles and successes of women in the workplace. She  is frequently sought out by media outlets for her perspective on workplace dynamics, conflict, and difficult conversations. Her advice has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Marketplace, and The Austin American-Statesman, as well as on WNYC, the BBC, and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

The post Episode 106: Getting Along With Difficult People at Work appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Is it possible to be a high-standards, results-driven leader while at the same time building an engaged, fun-to-work-with team? Many people would contend that doing either of these things well makes it almost impossible to succeed at the other. And yet our examination of 360-degree assessment data from more than 60,000 leaders showed us that leaders who were rated in the top quartile of both skills ranked in the 91st percentile of all leaders. It seems that not only is it possible to do both things well, but the best leaders are the very ones who manage to do both. In this episode, we discuss the balance between managing employee engagement and driving for results.

• We isolated leaders who ranked in the top quartile on both driving for results and people skills. We found that only 13% of leaders in our data set fit this profile. Still, this left us with a data set of 7,800 leaders to analyze

Leaders who were under 30 years of age were two to three times as likely to be effective at both results and engagement than their older compatriots.

Around age 40, it seems, leaders appear to have made their choice between being results driven or interpersonally strong. From there forward, only 10% of leaders in any age group would do both things well.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar monthly, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and talk about their latest leadership development research. Find out more information and register here.

Can You Be the Fun Boss That Still Drives for Results?– HBR Article by Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman

The post Episode 105: Behavioral Bridges—Increasing Employee Engagement While Driving For Results appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Regardless of who you are in an organization — a great question can help you learn more about your task, unlock hidden opportunities, deliver better results, and mitigate unforeseen risks. In general, most of us don’t ask enough questions because we fail to recognize the enormous benefits in terms of interpersonal bonding and how questions are the gateway to our learning information. In this episode, we are talking about one commonly underdeveloped skill for most managers, and that is the ability to ask good questions.

Register for Zenger Folkman’s upcoming webinar, ARE YOU REALLY LISTENING? A Guide to Tuning In and Asking The Right Questions.

• Leadership occurs through the communication process, and the most important part of communication is not the “half-time locker room speech.” It is the daily one-on-one interaction with colleagues.

The most valued questions are those that follow-up a comment the other person makes and confirms our genuine interest in learning more about what they had said. Nothing says “I care” more than the follow-up question that enables you to dig deeper and more broadly into a subject.

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar monthly, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and talk about their latest leadership development research. Find out more information and register here.

The Power of Listening and Asking Questions- Article by Jack Zenger

The post Episode 104: The Lost Art of Asking Good Questions first appeared on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

What skills do you really need from your workforce? What skills are most valuable What are the critical issues? If the answers were clear, every organization would likely change. There are literally thousands of variables that leave leaders baffled as they sift through the clutter of needs and options to decide what is really crucial. Most organizations are not able to fix everything; therefore, they need to prioritize the capabilities that, if changed, would have the greatest impact on the organization’s results. Today, we are exploring how to navigate which skills you need to develop that your company will value the most.

“A skills-based organization is using this data to focus on specific business problems: whom to hire, whom to promote, how to develop people for increased performance, and whom to consider for an internal position. Many companies are now “paying for skills,” encouraging employees to figure out what skills are in demand and go out and build them.” Credit: Josh Bersion 2023 HR Report 

The problem we have is that most leaders are so preoccupied with “fixing weaknesses” that they don’t seek feedback from group members to identify which of the changes they would appreciate most.

Word of warning about that: discovering only the needs for improvement should not be the priority when companies are seeking to increase their effectiveness.

In short, balance is vital. Organizations should do the following:

1)   Identify items in the organization that are both needed and valued by different work groups.

2)   Identify organizational strengths, and build on them.

Connect with Joe Folkman

Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

How to Correlate the Skills You Need With The Skills Your Company Values– Article by Joe Folkman

The post Episode 103: Skills, Skills, and More Skills— Finding What the Organization Values Most first appeared on ZENGER FOLKMAN.

Leaders are experiencing more demands for compassion at a time when there’s not a lot of room for compromise on what they have to deliver. Do they have to choose between kindness/compassion and the expectations for performance? We wanted to understand how we maximize support and, at the same time, drive performance. In this episode, we are exploring the link between leading with kindness and accountability.

“Tone-deaf compassion is more dangerous and costly than none at all.” Leaders have a big responsibility to figure out what matters to their employees.

Leading with kindness has the power to transform your workplace. Receiving those off-hand compliments or displays of gratitude or recognition creates a culture of generosity in an organization.

Quote from Mark Mortenson and Heidi Gardener: “Compassionate leadership isn’t simply about taking away work and giving people whatever they want. Nor does achieving high performance mean ignoring the needs and well-being of your employees. Leaders who strive for sustainably high performance — particularly in today’s environment — need to put in the time and the effort to ensure they’re enabling their employees to achieve it.”

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Zenger Folkman hosts an exclusive live webinar every month, where you can meet Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman and join in a conversation about their latest research in leadership development. Find out more information and register here.

Pairing Kindness with Accountability at Work– Article by Joe Folkman

The post Episode 102: Leading with Kindness and Accountability appeared first on ZENGER FOLKMAN.