CorpU Weekly Digest: Leadership Development (2012-Apr-16)

Topics: Leadership

Here are this past week's headlines in leadership development: 

• (1) New tool from Booz & Co can be repurposed for your leadership development program to help identify numbers of direct reports ;  
• (2) Helping leaders direct innovation, from a London Business School article on engineering in a rapidly changing world ; 
• (3) Between 2008 and 2010, companies with more diverse top teams were also top financial performers. McKinsey research shows that's probably no coincidence ; 
• Books: Work and Quality of Life: Ethical Practices in Organizations and The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education ; 
• Webinars ; and
• Conferences

 New tool from Booz & Co can be repurposed for your leadership development program to help identify numbers of direct reports.
C-Level leaders should be feeling some pressure. According to Thornton May, 60% of the Global 2000 are replacing leaders in the top functions, so a significant number of leadership transitions are underway. Besides the number of new leaders on the senior management team, the spans of control have been creeping up over the years, based on research by Raghuram Rajan and Julie Wulf ("The Flattening Firm" The Review of Economics and Statistics, Nov 2005 ) and by Maria Guadalupe, Hongyi Li and Julie Wulf ("Who Lives in the C-Suite" Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2011). 

Can professionals focused on leadership development address this need?

The team at Booz & Co have released a tool in their organization change and leadership unit that may be repurposed for general leadership development programs. The tool, called the C-Level Span of Control Diagnostic Tool  asks thirteen questions in five categories:

1. Position in the Executive Lifecycle
2. Degree of Cross-Collaboration
3. Activities Beyond Direct Span
4. Multi-Purposing: For CEOs Only
5. Current Span & Situation

These questions and the online tool provide a self-service way to diagnose how many direct reports one should have. Better still, it comes with a free article download from this month's Harvard Business Review by Harvard Business School Prof. Julie Wulf and Booz & Co's Gary Neilson, "How Many Direct Reports". Read Gary Neilson's article "Diagnosing Your Top Team's Span of Control" at Booz & Co.

 Helping leaders direct innovation, from a London Business School article on engineering in a rapidly changing world 
For an engineering company in a rapidly changing world, innovation is central, and in this interview with Richard Brass, Jürg Oleas talks about how to make innovating a habit, what makes a leader and how, when it comes to leadership, charisma just doesn't count. If you believe something is important for the company, then you have to show it on a daily level, to have it right in everybody's mind, not only the top managers but every employee. There are three different types of innovation at GEA, says Jürg:

 (1) Ideas/improvement programs
 (2) R&D functions
 (3) Innovation partnerships 

The first one is at a very low level, ideas improvement programs, where every employee is encouraged daily to improve small things around his or her work space, be it in factories or in offices or wherever. Employee collect points, the segment presidents get targets for the bonus and we have annual award-winners for the segments that have collected the most productive ideas. The second platform is the traditional domain of R&D staff, who sit in labs testing out different approaches. The third platform is innovation being done together with partners, in most cases with customers. Read the London Business School article, "Leaders Direct: The Leadership Gene" 

 Between 2008 and 2010, companies with more diverse top teams were also top financial performers. McKinsey research shows that's probably no coincidence.
There are many reasons companies with more diverse executive teams should outperform their peers: fielding a team of top executives with varied cultural backgrounds and life experiences can broaden a company’s strategic perspective, for example. And relentless competition for the best people should reward organizations that cast their nets beyond traditional talent pools for leadership. To understand whether reality is consistent with theory, McKinsey looked at the executive board composition, returns on equity (ROE), and margins on earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) of 180 publicly traded companies in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period from 2008 to 2010. This result suggests that for companies ranking in the top quartile of executive-board diversity, ROEs were 53 percent higher, on average, than they were for those in the bottom quartile. At the same time, EBIT margins at the most diverse companies were 14 percent higher, on average, than those of the least diverse companies (exhibit). Read "Is there a payoff from top-team diversity?"

Table 1: McKinsey Quarterly chart based on data from 2008-10: Companies with diverse executive boards enjoy significantly higher returns and return on equity

Source: Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Datastream, McKinsey Analysis

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 The Business of Learning: New Major Products, Mergers, Acquisitions, and Partnerships

No major news in mergers, acquisitions, or product releases.

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 Books To Read

Employees have personal responsibilities as well as responsibilities to their employers. They also have rights. In order to maintain their well-being, employees need opportunities to resolve conflicting obligations. Employees are often torn between the ethical obligations to fulfill both their work and non-work roles, to respect and be respected by their employers and coworkers, to be responsible to the organization while the organization is reciprocally responsible to them, to be afforded some degree of autonomy at work while attending to collaborative goals, to work within a climate of mutual employee-management trust, and to voice opinions about work policies, processes and conditions without fear of retribution. Humanistic organizations can recognize conflicts created by the work environment and provide opportunities to resolve or minimize them. The topic is covered through a series of essays from well known writers and professors to be released on May 31, 2012, called Work and Quality of Life. This collection documents the dilemmas that result from responsibility-based conflicts, including essays by Prof Carolyn Ball , Prof Joseph Sirgy, Prof Cath Sullivan, and Prof Stacey Kessler among others. The book is organized by sources of dilemmas that fall into three major categories: individual, organizational (internal policies and procedures), and cultural (social forces external to the organization), including an introduction and a final integration of the many ways in which organizations can contribute to positive employee health and well-being. This book is aimed at both academicians and practitioners who are interested in how interventions that stem from industrial and organizational psychology may address ethical dilemmas commonly faced by employees. Buy Now

In the book The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education, Prof Karl Kapp, known for his blog Kapp's notes as well as his instructional technology classes at Bloomsburg U, argues convincingly that gamification is not just about adding points, levels and badges to an eLearning program, but about fundamentally rethinking learning design. He has put together a brilliant primer for learning professionals on how to gamify learning, packed with useful advice and examples. Buy Now

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 Webinars 

The Human Capital Financial Statements Webcast Series
Date: N/A
Presenter: Jeff Higgins Register now

Social Learning Tips & Trends Webinar
Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012, 2:00 PM ET
Presenter: Sharlyn Lauby, SPHR, CPLP, President of ITM Group Register now

Mobile End User Experience
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 11:00 AM ET
Presenter: Aternity Register now

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 Conferences

Emotions and Education: Affect, Anxiety and Achievement
Date: April 19, 2012
Location: New York City, NY, USA Register now

2012 Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference and Workshop: Perfecting the Blend
Date: April 23-24, 2012
Location: Milwaukee, WI, USA Register now

Learning TECH 2012
Date: April 23 - 25, 2012
Location: Chicago, IL, USA Register now 

Delivering the Strategic Role of HR
Date: May 2, 2012 
Location: New Zealand Register now

Global Management Conference: Fourth Annual Conference on Globalization, Sustainability and Development, 2012
Date: May 2-5, 2012
Location: Rio De Janeiro, Brazil Register now

1st Annual People Effectiveness @ Work Conference
Date: May 8, 2012
Location: Johannesburg, South Africa Register now

HR Summit 2012
Date: May 9-12, 2012 
Location: Singapore Register now

The Mining and Resources Accelerated Learning and Workforce Development Conference 2012
Date: May 15, 2012
Location: Australia Register now

Corporate University Xchange's Global Leadership Congress
Date:  May 15-17, 2012
Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA Register now 

Social Recruiting Strategies Conference
Date: May 22-25, 2012
Location: Chicago, IL, United States Register now

National Institute on the Assessment of Adult Learning
Date: June 6-8, 2012
Location: Atlantic City, NJ, USA Register now

Leading Across Generations: Workforce Challenges and Opportunities
Date: June 13-15, 2012
Location: Berlin, Germany Register now

Gamification Summit
Date: June 19-21, 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA, United States Register now

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