Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

decision making

100 Best Performing CEOs: How Do You Measure Up?

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100 Best Performing CEOs: How Do You Measure Up?
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The Harvard Business Review (HBR) has just come out with its annual list of 100 best performing CEOs in the world.

Who are these leaders and what makes them different?

The team at HBR uses tough criteria to identify and rank these CEOs, assessing their capability to lead in a volatile world.

How do you measure such capability?

Outcomes.

Quite a bit of HBR’s process involves reviewing the profitability and forward movement of the company, seeing how well it sustains momentum in the midst of challenging outside forces – “savvy competitors, demanding customers, profit-hungry investors, political and economic headwinds” (Best Performing CEOs in the World 2018).

How would you measure up?

Is it fair to judge you as leader when external forces aren’t in your control?

Yes and no.

You certainly cannot change or control external forces.

But you can change the way you meet them.

And this is exactly how these 100 best performing CEOs became part of HBR’s list.

Of course, vision, strategy, and focused action all played into successful outcomes. But what makes the difference for winners once the plans are in place are two things: steadiness and stability.

That’s right – steadiness and stability.

Sound dull? These are two of the most underrated traits in leadership – and yet, two of the most important.

Steadiness is the ability to continue pushing through even at the toughest times so that you can emerge from the toughest of maelstroms. And stability is a foundational strength that provides focus, security and safety.

It stands to reason that, unless you can lead with steadiness and stability, you will compromise your targeted success.

I recall a time in my younger years when my then 35-year-old father left his teaching position to develop healthcare facilities. His vision and strategy were sound, and against all odds, he first developed a retirement center, a convalescent and rehab center, and a hospital all within three years. The city sorely needed these facilities – even the hospital which was just a mile from a larger more established one. The administrator of the latter had shared with Dad that they needed overflow facilities and if Dad would develop a community hospital, there were patients waiting.

So Dad began developing these with a passion and determination that were unparalleled. But he met with great resistance. Someone in town complained that if another hospital was built, that his dog would be nervous. Someone else tried to get in front of Dad and quickly develop a hospital before he did, even after Dad had procured the licenses and permissions necessary to break ground. There were fights and opposition all around. And 16 City Council hearings. Sixteen.

I reflect on that and ask how many people would have weathered all this at 35 years old. In the end, he won – and so did the town, which has benefited from these facilities for several decades, now.

But Dad could not have done this without unwavering steadiness – the commitment to push through even when incredibly discouraged and feeling alone. He could not have done this without the stability that his vision gave him – the strength and commitment to move with focus.

How would you rank your steadiness? And your stability in the face of opposing winds?

Here is my personal challenge to you for growth:

  • During this upcoming holiday season, I invite you to reflect on those times when you have faced difficulty, but still pushed through to successful outcomes. Celebrate this!
     
  • Ask yourself where there is room for more steadiness in your leadership…more stability. What stretch goals do you have for yourself, your team, for the company – and how will these traits play into reaching them?
     

Are you interested in developing greater leadership capacity in your work and life?

Come and join me at the Bellevue Club Hotel in the Seattle area on November 28 to hear more about how you can do so. Seating is limited and folks are flying in to attend, so please rsvp only if you are sure you can be there: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/3-essential-shifts-every-leader-must-make-tickets-51973207262.

Or for Southern California leaders, e-mail me at patti@patticotton.com for details of a private upcoming event in the Inland Empire.

Townsend Leadership

3 Essential Shifts Every Leader Must Make – Part 3

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3 Essential Shifts Every Leader Must Make Part 3: Leadership and Brain Trust
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Leadership and Brain Trust

How well prepared are you to lead into the future?

The world now requires that you lead at a higher level to navigate change and complexity.

It demands that you have a greater capacity for the kinds of decisions and challenges that confront you now and in the future.

This requires a powerful three-pronged approach to support your leadership.

Over the last two articles, we talked about two of these elements, and they are:

Without these two abilities, you as leader may be close to your expiry date.

This week, we’ll talk about the third and final element to developing your leadership capacity: brain trust.

What is brain trust, and why do you need it?

The term “brain trust” is a term that was first coined by James Kieran, a New York Times reporter. He used this term to describe the group of leaders assembled by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his presidential administration. President Franklin brought these “brains” together to advise him, decode problems, and design new solutions for America.

It is critical that a leader has a brain trust for several reasons. Here are the top five:

  • Perspective

Because leading requires complex decision-making, being able to see and understand a problem or challenge from all angles is necessary.

Albert Einstein’s quote reminds us that you can’t solve these with the same mindset that created them. However, it is often difficult to step outside oneself to see these additional angles. Having a brain trust made up of people who come from various industries and backgrounds means you can tap into a vast pool of experience for greater perspective and creative solutions.

President Roosevelt’s brain trust helped him to enact 19 laws to meet America’s challenges in just the first 100 days of him being in office. He freely admitted this was due to having an intellectual powerhouse to bring ideas and perspective that he could not bring to the table alone.

  • Powerful Support

It gets lonely when you carry big responsibilities. You balance many demands and set the standard for your organization.

Carrying all this alone can cause isolation and stress, as you feel you must face and meet these challenges by yourself. In fact, a recent survey shows that 60% of all leaders express feelings of isolation and they report that this hinders their performance.

Unburdening and processing with family, friends, or direct reports often creates greater stress on these relationships and can’t provide the right kind of support the leader needs to meet life and work effectively.

It is important for you as leader to have a safe and powerful support system that is trustworthy, confidential, and one that can receive and help process the complexity of your challenges.

  • Challenge

If you want to continue to grow so that you lead both your life and work solidly into the future, you need input.

What are you not seeing that you need to examine?

How is not leading at a higher level affecting your life and work?

With great responsibilities, you can operate from “stress mode” as you address the immediate and urgent. This can develop tunnel vision, and you will lean on familiar approaches that cannot meet more complex problems. This dynamic will keep you from being able to solve these, and to meet the important goals that will truly make a difference for you and the others around you.

A brain trust will challenge you where you might be playing small with limited thinking or approaches. It will provide that safe space for you to confront where you are holding yourself back and decide how you want to move forward.

  • Accountability

Change is hard; growth is hard. Without an accountability mechanism, the biggest goals and commitments are seldom met successfully.

As you process and make the decisions you need in order to move forward in both your life and work, a brain trust will keep you accountable to yourself and your commitments. And because a brain trust’s only agenda is your agenda, you can count on your brain trust as an unbiased and supportive group that has your best interests in mind.

This will help you to stay on track and to focus where you need in order to meet goals.

  • Community

How edifying and uplifting is your community?

If you are like most, you have little time to enjoy the nurturing benefits of connection and community. In fact, your responsibilities and pace as leader can limit your ability to form meaningful community and to enjoy the gifts and benefits of bonds and belonging.

Sadly, if you are like most leaders, your community feels fragmented and might be made up of some or all of these:

  • Frantic seasonal socializing to reconnect with old friends during holidays
  • Networking and brainstorming with peers
  • Industry or business-specific meetings with colleagues
  • Connections with families of your children and grandchildren during sports season
  • A weekly (if even that!) church experience

An intentionally-focused community that encourages intellectual improvement, supports personal and professional growth, and genuinely cares about you is an invaluable and rejuvenating asset to the leader. What’s more, being able to connect with this kind of community in time of crisis or celebration is priceless.

“When we live our lives in isolation, what we have is unavailable, and what we lack is unprocurable,” wrote Basil.

It is time to admit that going it alone doesn’t work anymore.

As you seek to meet the challenges of the future more effectively, having a solid brain trust is a not a “nice to have,” but a necessary component to your life and work.

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

3 Essential Shifts Every Leader Must Make – Part 2

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3 Essential Shifts Every Leader Must Make Part 2: 360° Leadership Development
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Are you prepared to lead into the future?

Most leaders are not.

They experience increasing pressure as they attempt to cover all the bases and feel unsettled about what might be coming next.

If that is you, please stay with me on this, because the volatility and complexity of change in the business world is only growing.

If you want to make sure you are prepared to lead into the future, you must make three shifts right now to navigate effectively through change, and if you don’t take quick action on these, your leadership will soon be reaching its expiration date.

In a previous article, we talked about the first of three necessary shifts to do so: sharpening your emotional intelligence to increase your relational skills. If you missed this, catch up here.

Now, on to the second of the three necessary shifts you need to make: 360° leadership development.

There is a great buzz about the fact that to really grow in your leadership, you must work on both horizontal and vertical development to meet a complex world. And this is true.

Horizontal development refers to increasing in knowledge, skills and competencies. We can measure this through leadership assessments, 360° feedback processes, and similar means. Companies invest in tremendous amounts of money to assess, measure, and hold people accountable to these, and this is necessary.

But in the last few years, we recognized that was no longer enough. We discovered that leaders who possessed the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to conduct business, were now experiencing an inability to meet the changing demands.

The world was changing – and their leadership was not.

Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

To expand on this truth, it has become clear that, “We can’t lead an organization of the future effectively by using the same kind of approaches we have used to lead the organization of today.” – Patti Cotton

To meet this problem, the leadership development world recognized the need for vertical development. Vertical development refers to the growth in a person’s thinking capability. It’s about how you think – how complex, strategic, interdependent, and systemic you are able to sift through challenges and make decisions. For more on this, read the white paper “Vertical Leadership Development-Part I” by Nick Petrie, Center for Creative Leadership.

“At last!” said the leadership development world. “We have now covered how to be more agile and complete in approaching change. We can rest easy!” Top executive coaches focused on the mindset shifts necessary to cultivate this, and we saw a lot of progress.

But a giant puzzle piece was missing and tragically continued to reveal itself in significant areas of the business world.

Here’s a small and partial list of contemporary business leaders who have run companies worth billions. They possess both horizontal and vertical development and, for quite a while, have been considered thought leaders ahead of the pack.

  • Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO, Theranos
  • Martin Winterkorn, former president of Volkswagen
  • Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals
  • Hisao Tinaka, former president of Toshiba

These people had the knowledge and competencies to run the organization. They developed the mindset shifts needed to develop their thinking capabilities so that they could meet change and future challenges. They were capable, high-performing, and they produced incredible results.

But the glaring piece that was missing in all cases – and the reason for their downfall – was that they were missing the third part of the 360° leadership equation: Character.

Character is a matter of trust.

And without trust, you won’t get far – at least, not for the long game.

If you are in this to win, you must not neglect your leadership character.

The people in the above list all showed a flawed or compromised character. The result has been that they have suffered personal leadership downfall, in some cases they are or have been under investigation with threatening jail time, and their respective organizations were either heavily fined, sold, or folded.

Now I am not suggesting that you should compare yourself to these people in any way – I’ve selected these people to make a point. However, I am proposing that you check to make sure that your own character is well-sharpened to support your leadership.

Can you deliver on the following traits consistently? Are they truly a part of you and the way you lead?

Five Key Leadership Character Traits:

  1. Integrity – Are you consistent and congruent in relating to others so that they know what they can expect from you, know that they can count on you?
  2. Respect – Do you respect yourself and others equally in your decisions and actions?
  3. Intent – Do you hold others in positive regard and with positive intent, so that your pre-assumptions and biases don’t curtail best thinking?
  4. Transparency – Are you authentic in your communications? Forthright in the way you confront conflict and resolve it? Candid in critical conversations so that you are tough on issues and tender on people?
  5. Connection – Do you genuinely desire to connect well with others – and are you able to do this successfully?

Without one of these, your leadership is headed toward its expiration date. Because character is the missing piece to the complete leadership picture; the 360° leadership equation.

In the short term, you and others may not notice the effects of a compromised or weak character. But in the long run, missing this will bring down not only your ability to lead, but is quite capable of bringing an entire organization to its knees, as we have seen.

What specific trait within your character needs attention? And if you don’t know, who among your trusted colleagues can help identify this? I look forward to your feedback.

Next week, we will explore the third of three shifts you need to make: Brain Trust.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Holding Others Accountable

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Holding Others Accountable
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Is it easy for you to hold others accountable? Even the most seasoned leaders can find this difficult.

Yet, accountability is the very thing that makes everything work.

Holding others accountable was indeed challenging for Randy, CEO of Andes, Inc., and this meant that the company wasn’t getting the results it needed. What’s more, Andes had begun to lose market share. Would it survive?

Randy was missing just one ingredient in order to turn things around.

Accountability.

Randy had brought in a bevy of consultants to review the company’s challenges. His drawer was full of strategic plans, and employees had undergone training in a number of programs meant to help them work better, smarter, and get greater results. Yet, nothing had worked. Meanwhile, it was discovered that some teams were duplicating efforts, and others weren’t delivering on what was expected. Randy was frustrated, and sometimes lost his temper, wondering why people weren’t just doing what they should do.

The fact was, he simply wasn’t holding his team accountable. And in turn, they weren’t holding their own teams accountable, either.

Things were a mess.

Holding others accountable is what is necessary to helping others to deliver on their commitment so that the work gets done. If you are responsible for organizational or team outcomes, it’s necessary to learn how to do this well so that you get the results you need. Holding others accountable is also a way of saying, “Your contributions matter,” which motivates employees and helps them to be more engaged.

Holding others accountable, however, can feel awkward.

And that’s what Randy felt. He was great at inspiring and motivating others but helping them to follow through was where he fell short. He thought that providing clear feedback felt like criticism, and so he avoided giving others the feedback they needed in order to know they were on track. Left to their own devices, the executive team simply interpreted what they thought should be done, did the best they could, but failed miserably because of a lack of information. They passed on this unfortunate culture of murky mediocrity to the rest of the organization – and this is why it started to fail.

Fortunately, with coaching, Randy turned things around. He met with his team, agreed on what was needed, and shared the 5 steps to hold others accountable. Over time, Andes moved into a position of excellence.

If you feel you need to strengthen your accountability game, use these 5 steps to put in place a system that works:

1. Be clear about your expectations.

In order for others to be able to deliver on your expectations, they need to understand what these are. Be sure that as you share what you expect that you ask them if they have questions and let them know that they will have access to you for questions as they move forward.

2. Help identify the skills and resources needed to support them.

What will they need in order to perform well? Who are the people they need to work with, and what are politics, protocols, and processes of which they need to be aware in order to succeed?

3. Follow up regularly.

Agree on the way in which your reports will keep you updated on their progress. Do you want them to meet with you regularly to report to you, or provide a written report? How often? What elements do you need to see in the report?

4. Give clear and timely feedback.

Honest and ongoing feedback is critical to the process. Be sure you are timely so that this becomes a powerful mentoring experience. And be clear in your feedback. If you are not, you should not expect to see the progress you expect.

5. Clear consequences.

Have you made sure you have done everything you can to help the person succeed in performance?  If they have succeeded, reward this in a way that is appropriate to the outcome such as acknowledgment, recognition, or even a bonus or promotion. If there has been a lack of clarity on your part, be sure you course-correct this by repeating the steps above. And if the person shows signs of inability or commitment to perform, then it’s time to release them from the assignment or role with any other appropriate steps needed.

I challenge you to make accountability a chief focus for the coming season. Your leadership will be even more effective, and your results will help the organization to thrive.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

When Servant Leadership Doesn’t Work

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When Servant Leadership Doesn’t Work
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It is said that servant leaders – those who truly lead from the heart – are the most effective.  

Indeed, inspiring and influencing others to rise to their personal and collective best yields much greater results. And frankly, this makes a significant impact in the lives of those who are part of this, as well as those clients who benefit.  

But there are situations when such leadership does not work. 

How can you tell whether to adopt this style or not?

First, servant leadership is a philosophy that genuinely puts people first, takes a keen interest in their development, and embraces shared power rather than a hierarchical style.  

In fact, leading from the heart – another way to describe servant leadership at its finest – requires embracing and modeling 7 traits: 

  1. Trust  
  2. Authenticity 
  3. Empathy 
  4. Compassion 
  5. Humility 
  6. Courage 
  7. Motivation  

The problem is, when leaders don’t incorporate all 7 traits, the power of leading from the heart is compromised. 

The question becomes, “Are you willing to work on adopting all 7 traits?”

Ask yourself the following: 

  • Trust – do my directives and communication reflect integrity? Are these consistent, and if not, am I willing to course-correct this with others so that I build trust with them? 
  • Authenticity – do I come from “center” with ease, not trying to emulate the style or persona of others?  
  • Empathy – can I easily detect the emotions of others, place myself in their shoes, and affirm them? 
  • Compassion – do my decisions and actions reflect that I put people first? 
  • Humility – do I respect others as much as I do myself, and can I recognize their gifts and talents as much as my own? Do I realize that without my team and the employee base that we could not accomplish what we do? 
  • Courage – am I willing to confront the tough stuff, even when the topic and decisions I may need to make are not popular ones? 
  • Motivation – am I motivated first by what is best for the organization, or am I preoccupied with what is best for me? 

If you are willing to sharpen these 7 traits, you will find that your team and culture will reflect greater satisfaction, higher engagement, and the innovative spark to help you and the organization meet the future. 

Which of these traits is most important for you to work on as you begin to up-level your leadership?

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC