CorpU Weekly Digest: Leadership Development (2012-Feb-06)

Topics: Leadership

CorpU publishes three weekly digests for its members and for emerging and established learning leaders who see the value of an aligned learning function to deliver business impact and results. Here are this week's headlines in leadership development: 

• How can you integrate learning from the arts in your leadership development program?
• Predicting leadership competencies needed in the future – does your approach stack up?
• Building healthy teams starts with building effective leaders
• The Business of Learning: Kenexa Acquires Outstart
• Books
• Webinars
• Conferences

 How can you integrate learning from the arts in your leadership development program?
The company BIZZARTS has started to make an impact, based on the conviction that art can make an important contribution to the business world, both economically and creatively. What started out as an attempt to support the music ensembles financially turned out to be a powerful learning experience. The key take-aways: 1) management education goes deeper when it is experience-based; 2) music is a vehicle that allows us to discover things that we are unable of articulating and knowing otherwise; 3) simple habits like tuning of the instruments, the way musicians communicate and how they put themselves in service of the performance turn out to be experiences that really stick with managers; and 4) what sets BIZZARTS apart from other management education is that the learning is triggered, not transmitted. Read "Music and Leadership: a Perfect Combination"

 Predicting leadership competencies needed in the future – do your planning efforts stack up?
In a session entitled "The New Context for Leadership", Peter Grauer, the Chairman of Bloomberg, talked about the results of a study to identify what leadership competencies were most valued in his company. The top performers had contradictory attributes, what he called the "and factor". Among the common unlikely yoked-together competencies:

• the ability to craft a vision of the future and strong tactical capability
• capacity to offer strong guidance while being open to challenge
• reliance on extensive networks while having the capacity to moving fast (i.e., unilaterally)
• hands-on while also empowering others

A similar idea was advanced at the Women Leader's dinner. Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean president, said that in changing times the best leaders are those who can be generals one day and consensus-builders the next. Josette Shiner, UN World Food Program Executive Director, agreed stating that today's leadership still needs to be hierarchical but also needs to be flexible. Read INSEAD's "Is 'Command and Collaborate' the new leadership model?"

 Building healthy teams starts with building effective leaders
Anyone who has worked in an organization or been responsible for leading a team understands the frustration resulting from office politics, turf wars and team dysfunction. Solutions to these challenges can be elusive and prickly if not temporary and ineffective. In an interview between IESE professor Marta Elvira and Patrick Lencioni (a well-respected expert and author in this area) suggests that healthy organizations have four things in common: 1) cohesive leadership at the top; 2) intellectual alignment; 3) reinforced communication; and 4) restructure system. Watch the interview "The Unwavering Truths at the Heart of Great Teams"

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

The mergers and acquisitions continue at a high pace in 2012 an continues to suggest better solutions for integrated approaches to talent management (e.g., recruitment, development, retention). Kenexa, known for its integrated talent acquisition and talent management solutions that have impacted 110 million employees, has agreed to acquire Outstart, a company with deep roots producting systems and applications for learning content management and recently moving into learning management systems, mobile learning distribution/delivery, and content development. What remains to be seen is what exactly Kenexa will integrate, and why. Read the press release.

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 Books To Read

In the revised edition of Managing Organizational Behavior, Henry Tosi and Massimo Pilati cover the field of organizational behavior in a theoretical and applied way that both students and instructors will find engaging and informative. For use in introductory and advanced undergraduate courses, the book covers a broad range of topics in the field, including: personality, motivation, groups, power, and leadership. It integrates the most current research in a clear and accessible manner and incorporates new thinking in the field with tried and true practices. At its heart, this book is a comprehensive introduction to the present state of knowledge in the field of organizational behavior. The authors treat a relevant and critical theme in organizational studies: the systematic and scientific analysis of individual behavior in different organized contexts. This book identifies and analyzes three distinct and interdependent perspectives on organizational behavior. Buy Now 

Strategy and leadership have become separated in the business world. Legendary Harvard Business School Professor Cynthia Montgomery reveals why and how they need to be re-integrated for ultimate business success. Cynthia Montgomery teaches the globally-renowned OPM (Owner, President, and Manager) course at Harvard Business School. Montgomery's course teaches them a totally new way to understand leadership, a way that fuses leadership with strategy. Her approach calls for a reset of current thinking about both. She shows that strategy is not just a tool for outwitting the competition—it is the most powerful means a leader has for shaping a firm itself. In book The Strategist: Putting Leadership Back Into Strategy, Montgomery takes the readers through the paces of her world-renowned course, teaching them how to develop the skills and sensibilities that living strategy and real leadership demand. No other book marries strategy and leadership in the same way—a way readers will find challenging, intriguing, and ultimately, inspiring. Buy Now

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 Webinars 

Social Media and Trainers
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 18.30-19.30 GMT / 12:30pm ET
Presenters: Jane Hart will be hosting the following webinar In conversation with Jane Bozarth Register now 

Leveraging Differences for Business Success
Date: February 23, 2012, 1pm ET
Presenters: Martin Davidson, PhD, teaches Leadership and Organizational Behavior at Darden Register now

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 Conferences

Sixth Annual National HR in Hospitality Conference & Expo
Date: February 27 - 29, 2012
Location: San Francisco, CA, USA Register now 

HR 2012
Date: March 13-16, 2012
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA Register now

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