“Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won’t make a company successful.” Robert Kiyosaki

Leaders come from all walks of life, each with their own strengths and experiences. No matter how different, each has at least one thing in common – the ability to grow and mature as a leader.

 

According to a steady pulse of executive surveys, most worry their teams do not have the leadership abilities to accomplish their strategic priorities. Other surveys show these executives’ concerns often become reality, as research indicates only 20 to 30 percent of strategic initiatives of succeeding.

How do we break this pattern? How do we accelerate improvements in leadership performance that help companies achieve strategic goals?

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Times are changing. With the rise of the millennials and the shift from traditional project teams to more cross-functional, temporary project teams on the rise, organisations recognise the need to work harder to keep their employees engaged and retain their best employees more than ever before. Consequently, organisations are shifting their performance management approach. The traditional, inflexible annual appraisal is proving to be less effective and employers are shifting their performance management practices more employee focused, flexible, regular and two-way communication reviews.

Here’s how to shake up your performance-management practices:

 

Marshall Goldsmith is a singular phenomenon in the world of executive coaching, with top global leaders providing glowing endorsements of the impact he's made in helping them improve as leaders. The issue, there's only one Marshall Goldsmith and how can the rest of us benefit from his trademark coaching?

To give leaders a deeper experience of his way of coaching, AchieveForum has partnered with Goldsmith to develop a state-of-the-art learning solution: "High-Performance Leadership: Applying Insights from Marshall Goldsmith™" 
 

As we enter the New Year, the AchieveForum team looks back on 2016 and makes predictions for 2017, considering what we learned about leadership development and how these insights will impact the year ahead.

Top companies recognise and embrace the power of their workforce’s progression.

Knowledge capital—the expertise and capability of employees—is fast becoming a key competitive advantage in today’s business world. Top organisations recognise that the knowledge and strengths of their employees are central to their success: employees are more than an asset, they are the base source of growth. 

Some 66% of the “world’s most admired companies”, and 30% of other large companies list building human capital as one of the goals for their managers. To attract and then retain people who can achieve critical business results, companies must invest and be known to invest in their knowledge capital. 

Coaching is Fundamental to Performance Management

Coaching is fundamental to the new approach to performance management that is sweeping the business world. As Russ Becker, CEO of AchieveForum outlined in our recent POV on performance management, the best of this approach strives to improve performance – actually improve performance – by helping people think and do things differently, to achieve results that matter.

As you progress throughout your career and begin to transition into leadership roles, one thing becomes abundantly clear, it’s not about you. It’s about the performance of your team, and the organisation.

In today’s business environment, coaching plays a vital role due to a greater appreciation of the value of an organisation’s knowledge and human capital. To achieve critical results and remain competitive, organisations see coaching not only as a means to shape individual performance but also, increasingly, as a means to build broader organisational capacity.

I’ve heard senior leaders at various organisations confess that their mid-level leaders aren’t proactive enough when it comes to executing strategy. And mid-level managers at those same companies have shared that they don’t receive enough direction from leadership around strategy. The fact remains that a fundamental role of a mid-level manager is to translate strategy into action. The challenge is how to do that in an environment of constant change and often insufficient communication.
 

Annual reviews are going the way of the dinosaur. Companies of all sizes and industries are doing away with annual performance reviews because they no longer find them effective.

Executives and their leadership teams do three big things. They build a strategic vision, they mobilise an organisation to execute that vision, and they guide an organisation through and around implementation challenges that occur in making that vision a reality


In pursuing this threefold agenda, leaders actively cultivate a context that both engages others and promotes their accountability—this includes junior colleagues, peers, and senior colleagues. 

 

The sales manager has a very important job in any business organisation. In the corporate world, sales managers are responsible for increasing the sales and revenue of organisations. Their responsibilities also include maintaining the right balance between meeting short-term targets and long-term objectives, closing sales, mentoring co-workers and developing successful sales strategies. However, when the sales managers are not able to balance their responsibilities and reach the level of proficiency required, the success of the business organisation can be at jeopardy. This is why business organisations should help their sales managers in mastering the skills required to do the job well.

Through extensive research, The Forum Corporation has found that there are three essential roles, the sales managers must fulfil, in order to successfully do their job. These roles are:

1. The role model - the sales managers must be the perfect role model for the sales representatives of the organisation. Hence, the sales managers must be good salespersons so that they can help secure the big deals and demonstrate the sales tactics and approaches they want the sales team to use. The sales representatives should be able to look up to them and learn from them.

2. Motivator and coach - they should motivate the sales reps to improve their performance and also coach them to perform better. They should have strong people management skills so that they can ensure that each and every member of their team is performing as expected. Coaching and motivating are important daily tasks performed by all successful sales managers.

 

In today’s business world, where most organisations are flatter, decentralised and geographically disparate, and where employees often work virtually, managers are hard pushed to control workloads or to know what their employees are actually doing with their time. Neither companies nor employees have an expectation of a long-term relationship, yet interpersonal skills, innovative ideas, and motivational tools have never been more important in creating successful teams. 

The Importance Of Mid-Level Leaders

Mid-level leaders are a vital linchpin in the execution of a company’s strategic priorities. They serve two critical functions. First, they translate strategic priorities into actionable plans. Second, they drive the implementation of these plans through and around anticipated and unanticipated challenges. 

Helping mid-level leaders excel at these tasks is a top priority for organisations.  Our recent research makes compelling reading.  If you want to read more click here.