Toine Grotens Blog

How Remarkable Women Lead

Toine Grotens — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:01:30 +0000

A Breakthrough Model for Work and Life
By Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston
Avon (AVP) Chairman and CEO Andrea Jung has a plaque she keeps behind her desk that depicts four footprints: that of an ape, a barefoot man, a wingtip shoe, and finally a high heel. It once belonged to her predecessor and mentor, Jim Preston, who told her early on that “one day a woman will run this company—a woman should run this company.”

The day Jung became CEO, Preston gave it to her. “The idea is the evolution of leadership,” Jung says.

Encapsulating the way notable women rise to success is the stated goal of How Remarkable Women Lead by McKinsey consultants Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston. Besides Jung, the authors interviewed Time Inc. (TWX) Chairman and CEO Ann Moore, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde (page 78), and Xerox (XRX) Chairman Anne Mulcahy, among many others. The book is packed with revealing anecdotes from women in high places.

The stories are often inspiring, but Barsh and Cranston fall short of persuasiveness when they argue that their “Centered Leadership” model is “groundbreaking,” as the book-jacket flap claims. And they could have made more of the five years of proprietary research data they promote on the cover. While it’s refreshing to see a leadership book directed at women when just 3% of large U.S. corporations are run by them, this one has, at times, a self-help tone that may turn some readers off.

Barsh and Cranston began their research by interviewing more than 100 high-achieving women, mostly in business, academia, and government. They noticed common factors that led to the women’s success. After conducting additional surveys and studying academic research, the authors boiled down their findings to five common traits. Top women leaders manage their energy well, find meaning in their work, excel at framing problems and solutions, connect with many colleagues and “sponsors”—mentors in senior positions—and engage deeply in their jobs. Taken together, the authors call this system Centered Leadership and use it for development programs at McKinsey. The book is structured around examples, anecdotes, and tips for achieving Centered Leadership.

Traits such as being energetic and having an ability to find meaning in one’s work “lie beyond traditional approaches to management and professional development,” write Barsh and Cranston. And while it’s true that books on leadership typically stick to topics such as building the right teams, focusing on core strengths, and communicating a clear strategy, the elements in this “model” will feel like common sense to some readers. Those who have read popular management thinkers such as positive-psychology expert Martin Seligman, Claremont Graduate University psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and best-selling “energy management” gurus Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz will also find some of this material familiar. To distinguish their book, the authors could have delved deeper into the similarities and differences between male and female leaders found in their proprietary research. Instead, their extensive data mostly appear in an appendix.

How Remarkable Women Lead is best suited to female managers looking for lessons from others’ routes to the top. There’s a breath of fresh air in the candor of Axis Bank CEO Shikha Sharma’s embarrassing tale of a deputy’s jihad-themed sales program when she was at India’s ICICI Bank (IBN), which landed her in hot water, and in former Qantas Chairman Margaret Jackson’s recounting of a botched interview she gave while in the hospital and on medication. Some revelations are both reassuring and amusing: Ann Moore says “forget perfection and balance!” in recalling her failed attempt to be both a media exec and a producer of homemade baby food.

Still, the book occasionally reads like Chicken Soup for the Female Leader’s Soul. In explaining their Centered Leadership concept, Barsh and Cranston tell readers: “Feel the gravity beneath your two feet holding you steady as you stretch to the sky” and are given to such phrases as “Laugh for the fun of it!” and “We’re here to help you on your way.” Those who can look past such tropes should end up inspired by the truly remarkable women in Remarkable Women. But those looking for surprising secrets of their success are likely to be left wanting more.

Gregor is BusinessWeek’s management editor.

The Key to Communication at the Executive Level

Toine Grotens — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:37:09 +0000

When the shuttle Columbia was in orbit, and before it began its disastrous re-entry, engineers from Boeing were concerned it may have been damaged during its launch. They prepared three reports for top NASA managers on the subject. At least one of these reports was a PowerPoint presentation. Edward Tufte, the dean of visual communication, has analyzed the principal slide from this report in an essay called PowerPoint Does Rocket Science – And Better Techniques for Technical Reports. (The essay is available at www.edwardtufte.com, in the “Ask E. T.” section.)

Speaking is only half the communication process, yet few of us are paying any attention to executive comprehension. It’s a field we ignore at our peril. When an executive fails to understand messages from subordinates, the costs can be very high.

And even more: did the executive communicate in such an effective way that “the organisation” knows what the spoken words mean for their respective working day

Every organization has problems to some degree in getting messages up to the executive level, but we see it most clearly in the case of NASA, whose communication failures have been dissected in the public record. There is widespread agreement that a major contributing cause to the losses of both the Challenger and the Columbia space shuttles was the differing perceptions of NASA’s managers and its engineers of the safety of the shuttle system. In other words, the safety concerns of the engineers didn’t get through to management.

We can fault executives for failing to understand information that’s given to them. It’s certainly true that the mastery of active listening skills should be a requirement for an executive position. But we also need to recognize that to point fingers at the people who don’t comprehend messages is to protect those who fail to make themselves clear. If you send a message, don’t you have at least some responsibility for its reception, even if it’s a message to your boss?

Let’s get back to NASA for a moment, not because NASA is a particularly egregious example but because, as we said, its problems are in the public record and are therefore accessible.

The slide stated that it was possible for a foam particle of sufficient mass and velocity to penetrate the tiles covering the edge of the wing during launch. It was saying, in other words, that the Columbia could have suffered the kind of damage the engineers were concerned about. But, as Tufte points out, the information is buried in a 125-word arrangement of bullet points, sub-bullet points, sub-sub bullet points, and so on. Not only is the information difficult to separate out of the story being told on the slide, but the slide itself is labeled “review of test data indicates conservatism for tile penetration,” which seems to present an optimistic conclusion.

NASA’s executives decided to go ahead with re-entry, with tragic results. It’s a decision that would doubtless have been made differently if that PowerPoint slide had been titled “test data indicates possible destruction of shuttle on re-entry.” The benefit of the communication (that of preserving the lives of the crew) would have been manifest.

It would have received the executive attention it needed.

Coach executive consultant

Toine Grotens,

Time to demonstrate strong leadership in Healthcare !

Toine Grotens — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:08:14 +0000

The question looms—how are we going to respond to the growing demand for healthcare that is accountable, focused on quality, committed to patient safety, and fair and accessible?

How will we, as the industry’s leaders, influence and lead

the healthcare reform agenda?

Nobody is better suited than the industry’s leaders to make the changes that are needed, and here’s why: as healthcare academics, practitioners, executives, and students one has come to the field as individuals who are mission-driven to provide care and improve the health of the public. That is at our core.

But now is the time to demonstrate our leadership

capacity to drive transformational and sustainable changes

in organizational capacity and performance.

What we know is that healthcare must not simply change incrementally, it must be transformed holistically. And strong leadership will be at the heart of that transformation.

At least new partnering between health and business management will lead to impressive pay offs.

Toine Grotens

Coach executive consultant

Tough Tactics for Tough Times

Toine Grotens — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:28:27 +0000

Tough Tactics for Tough Times sets out 50 practical ways to cope with changing economic conditions, including reducing costs, increasing staff effectiveness, maintaining a marketing initiative, maximizing business from good customers and spotting opportunities for new business.

In difficult economic times, decision-makers in business need to take decisive action. It is essential that they combat the pressures and respond to difficult market and economic conditions in a way that minimizes negative effects.

Toine Grotens,

Coach executive consultant

Old boys fun work !

Toine Grotens — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:34:59 +0000

I recently met a couple of “old” colleagues. A few years passed by without being aware of how we individually developed. I found out how interesting and learnfull it can be to exchange our all achievements and enthusiasm. Han, Karel and others are all professionals in the business of people support and development. We will gear up and intensify this professional sub-network again. For exhanges and above all fun. The real professional is in the constant learnmode oneself.

Toine Grotens,

Coach executive consultant