Interpersonal Edge: Moving From Good to Great

You’re highly skilled and experienced. Your background is solid. And you have been placed in a position of great responsibility.

Why aren’t you getting the results you seek?

The answer is probably behavioral. You see, as we advance in our careers, we usually don’t need more hard skills to reach higher and greater goals. Instead, most professionals simply haven’t adopted the executive behaviors necessary to be more effective.

Consider the three following executives:

• Sandy, an experienced wealth advisor, networks diligently with high-potential referral partners, but receives no referrals. She believes she is networking with the wrong people, and is going to focus elsewhere for new business.
• Mark, a senior vice president, is seeing very low productivity in his area. He has provided incentives, and sent his team to some great trainings. But nothing has worked so far, and he is convinced that the millennials on his team are tainting group work ethics. He is going to start working with HR to write people up.
• Catherine, a partner from a highly-esteemed law firm, is charged with business development. The problem is, she’s great at marketing, but not at closing sales. She tells herself it’s just a question of numbers and decides to ramp up her efforts. The problem is, she doesn’t know how she will find the time to do this, when she is already stretched to deliver services to current clients.

What do these three scenarios have in common?

1. The people in each scenario are highly skilled in their area of expertise.
2. All of them think they know the reason for not getting better results – but none of them are correct.
3. They each have one or more executive behaviors that are causing the problem.

Executive behaviors help to cultivate trust and credibility. They help you engage with others and motivate them more effectively. They help increase your influence and get greater results. They help you execute at higher levels, even under turbulent times.

Executive behaviors are what make the difference between being good – and being great.

Unfortunately, just because you have made partner in a firm or part of the C-suite, this doesn’t mean that greater executive behaviors will emerge on their own, or rub off on you. A mentor can’t fix this for you, and you can’t read a book or attend trainings or forums to make this happen. These are all excellent ways to learn new things and increase your awareness. But they can’t help you to make the personal shifts you need in order to be more effective.

You see, adopting executive behaviors means first knowing how to identify which behaviors you need to adopt or to replace, and then you must understand how to work on systematically integrating them into the way you work, testing them and adjusting for efficacy as you do this, so that you can make them a natural part of your personal leadership.

Here are the key executive behaviors missing from our scenarios: 

• Sandy has great credibility, but she cannot connect with others in a way that instills trust. And if people don’t trust, credibility doesn’t matter. She simply won’t get the referral. In fact, the people with whom Sandy is networking are referring often and well – just not with her.
• Mark’s inability to listen and his avoidance of conflict have hurt his team. His employees have come to him with problems in the past, but he has quickly minimized concerns, and said he will “look into it.” But he never does. His employees don’t trust or respect him, and they have become disengaged. Some of his key players are quietly seeking work elsewhere.
• Catherine lacks executive presence, and specifically, her voice and language style downplays her self-assurance. Her potential clients describe her as “nice,” but not assertive enough to instill confidence. Since she is the face of her firm, they assume her firm is not effective.

These scenarios have a happy ending. I know, because I worked with them to adopt the executive behaviors they needed to turn their leadership and business around.

It may be just one key executive behavior that keeps you from moving from good to great.

What would stepping up your effectiveness do for you? What difference would it make to your business or organization?

To your success!