With more people moving, especially some of our top talent, the question is, "why?"  At Emerge, we believe that finding and retaining top-talent is fundamentally a product of the quality of the people who lead them.  If you have people who lead top-talent, and those leaders are not so effective, then it may be likely you will lose them.  However, leaders who have fully transitioned and meet the expectations of the leadership role, do those things that promote engagement, build trust and keep the talented contributors you have struggled so hard to find.

The biggest difference from managing others (individual contributors) to managing first-line managers is that in the latter, managers must broaden their approach to the people and the organization. Before, individual contributions were still a small part of their role expectations. Now, they need to divest themselves of the focus on individual tasks and instead focus on building the organization's future leadership. The key skills that must be mastered include selecting people for first-line leadership, delegating the appropriate managerial and leadership work to them, measuring their progress as managers, and coaching them through their day-to-day work. This is the point where managers must begin to think beyond their function and concern themselves with strategic issues that support the overall business.  

In this 60-minute session, we will discuss some of the obstacles that managers experience in maximizing their contribution and a leading-edge process for helping Managers of Managers to maximize their impact to their organizations.

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/315188504

By taking the wrong approach to their leadership responsibilities, leaders within organizations can wreak havoc on the people they lead (influencing decisions to leave their jobs, sabotaging the success of their team, etc.), the organizations they work for (lower productivity, actively seeking ways to get in the way, etc.), and themselves (frustration, burnout, dissatisfaction with their work, etc.).  In a recent article published in the Daily News of Sri Lanka, T. Tharani from the Department of Management, Eastern University, this problem is NOT strictly a problem in the U.S.A., but is a significant issue-multi nationally and multi-culturally.

One of the primary things we try to help our clients and their leaders understand is is that the first-line leaders, leaders of leaders, and other people that are looked to for direction and counsel must be able to translate lofty goals and ideas into action.  According to the article:

Of course, this is what we do.  Our primary purpose is to assist those people who must become leaders, to stop thinking, feeling, valuing, and behaving like individual contributors who do hands-on work, to start approaching their work the way we expect leaders to do it.  By providing "transition" training (that is, transitioning INTO the role of leader) and "skill" training (that is, transitioning WITHIN the role of leader) to leaders at all levels, their effectiveness, contribution, and outputs are dramatically increased.  To help facilitate this 2-part development process, we have recently launched our Leadership Academy, wherein we combine the best of the transition and skill development to maximize the resources you need to put towards the development of your people.

"But," you say, "Resources for development cost money.  We don't have budget to their development."

Well, we recognize the plight of many organizations and the demands for budget dollars.  In order to help organizations achieve the maximum benefit from their limited resources, we have come up with numerous ways of implementing the needed development.  All the way from online resources, to intensive face-to-face experiences, Emerge can provide you with what you need, the way you need it, at the cost you can afford.

Again from the article:

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, innovation isn’t a genetic endowment magically given to some and not others; it’s a set of skills that can be developed with practice,” Dyer says. “If you want to be one of the really successful people that make a mark in business, you want to be the person that comes up with the idea, not just the person who carries out others’ ideas."

In a 6-year study conducted in partnership with Harvard Business School and INSEAD, Dyer discovered that successful innovators consistently practice 5 key skills that lead to their success... unlike the rest of us who more frequently implement or carry out the ideas of others.

Below are the 5 skills discovered:

Questioning

“It became clear early on that these folks asked a lot more questions than your typical executive,” Dyer said. “Especially questions that challenge the status quo.”

• Write 10 questions each day that challenge assumptions in your company or industry. Asking “why?” “why not?” and “what if?” spur creative thinking. Embrace constraints. For example, ask, “If we were legally barred from doing things the way we do them now, what would we do?”

Observing

“But if you just sit in your room and question all day, you are not going to start an innovative business,” says Dyer, who chairs the Marriott School’s Department of Organizational Leadership and Strategy. “There’s an action-oriented attitude that is captured in observing and these other skills.”

• Watch people, especially potential customers. Watch how customers experience a product or service in their natural environment. Focus on what’s different than you expected.

Experiment

• Seek training outside your expertise. Take apart a product or process just to see how it works.

Networking

“Rather than network to gain access to resources or to market yourself, connect with others simply to find and test new ideas. This will widen your perspective,” Dyer says.

• Contact the five most creative people you know and ask them to share what they do to stimulate creative thinking. Go to conferences that include people from outside your industry.

Associating

• Connecting seemingly unrelated questions and ideas is the skill that brings all the others together, Dyer explains. But associating is triggered by new knowledge that is acquired through questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking.
  

For the full article click here.

At Emerge Leadership Group we find these skills and practices most interesting.  Indeed, the proprietary research we conduct shows very similar things among successful leaders and leaders-of-leaders.  Indeed, ELG research has identified the "5 Key Accountabilities of Leadership."™ Of our 5 Accountaibilities, 3 of them map directly onto Dyers practices, with the other each representing combinations of our other Accountaibilties. 

If you would like to learn more about how Emerge Leadership Group can assist you or your organization in developing leadership potential and/or innovation, please contact us to setup a conversation at your convenience.

Please note: this position is commission only.

If you are interested in applying, please email us the following information:

1. Your resume and cover letter
2. Materials / portfolio of your work (digital copies or web links please)
   
3. Your geographic region
4. Salary expectations

More information on this position can be found on its Job Description page.

Emerge Leadership Group is an equal opportunity employer.

If there is any information that you seek, but is not yet available, please submit a request to us.  As soon as we are able, we will post that information on this site so that others might benefit from it as well.

Although many management consulting organizations have attempted to address the issue of First-Line Leaders Development, not one has brought together the research capability and leading-edge content that you will find in the First-Line Leader Academy. Through the paring of the Emerge Leadership/Ken Blanchard Leadership capabilities,the First-Line Leader Academy integrates the Leadership Transition Process with the Situational Leadership II Process to form a very powerful learning experience