3 Pieces of Advice for People in Leadership Roles
In this episode of the Cerius Business Today Podcast, we are joined with Interim HR Executive Scott Coolidge to talk about leadership roles.
He has over 35 years of experience, almost exclusively in Human Resources. About half of his career was with large consulting firms, including Towers Perrin and Hay Management Consultants. The other half was spent in corporate roles in HR and various capacities.
He shared 3 pieces of advice for a CEO:
Firstly, it’s all around leadership – who you select to put into leadership roles at all levels of the organization. I don’t care if they’re supervisors, mid-level managers, directors, or executives. So often the default position is to take the person who’s your best technician, best technically who has grown up through the organization and selected them into these leadership roles. And often they’re simply not well-suited for management or leadership roles. That’s not to say they can’t be developed into that, but often times it’s a situation where they’re just not effective leaders and building out the selection process in order to identify and put people into leadership roles at all levels, I would say is the most critical thing that any CEO and management team could do.
Number 2 I would say that it’s around the, I’m going to call it the performance management framework. What I mean by that is really from two perspectives. What are you focused on in terms of overall business performance, what are the metrics? And how does that translate into the performance management process that you used for employees in order to get people to focus on the right things and have them working that optimal levels in order to achieve their personal objectives and those of the organization and building alignment between business objectives and people objectives. Look we all know business particularly in this environment changes almost every day and therefore the performance that you’re expecting from people at all levels is going to change constantly. You have to have people in place who are effective at providing feedback, both positive and negative, and getting people to change direction and encouraging them and having the right mechanisms in place to reward them.
The third thing is taking a look at your reward and recognition programs. So many businesses, big and small, particularly small ones that are trying to grow to that next level. Taking a look at how you pay people: base compensation, bonus compensation. Equally important I would argue are recognition programs that you have in place because everyone knows that people want to be recognized and paid for doing a really solid job.
To learn about how Cerius Interim Management can help you, please visit our home page by clicking here.