In spite of the proliferation of assessments, surveys and 360’s designed to spot high potential leaders, picking them out of the crowd is still almost as much art as it is science. Take heart, the key word here is “almost”. There are methods that increase the accuracy of the process. Here’s how we think about it.

High Po for What?
When we are asked to weigh-in on the assessment of a leader, it is helpful to know if the client wants to assess potential (what we call “headroom”) or capability and effectiveness in current role (“fit”) or a new role requiring untested trait- and skill sets than those in their current job. Knowing what we are assessing for is critical. Just about every time we miss (or hit a bull’s eye) assessing a High Po, our results are tied to understanding what they are being assessed for.

The Art of Observation and Inquiry
Once we know what we are assessing, the next step is to determine how to observe the person and what types of questions to ask them and the people around them to make an accurate determination. We typically evelop a list of a dozen or less questions to frame the discussion. The questions need to be open ended (to create dialogue) and they need to assess three things:
1. Has the High Po proven they are able to think at the appropriate level of complexity for the new position?
2. Do their innate, trait based talents line-up with the needs of the position?
3. Is their further advancement a matter of maturity or dealing with a dysfunctional behavior?

Ability to Deal with Complexity – The simplest, most accurate method to determine the level of complexity a person is capable of handling is to assess how far in to the future they can work. For example, if their day-to-day work mostly involves tasks that take less than a year to complete, its a good bet that working on a project that has a 2 year or more time horizon will be a stretch for them – not impossible perhaps, but a stretch. As a rule of thumb, a good upper level middle manager should have experience managing one or more projects and tasks that take 24 – 48 months to complete. If they haven’t had the chance to manage something with a time span in this range, try giving them a 12 – 24 month time-to-complete project to manage and observe how and if they are able to stay focused on producing results and seeing the project through to the end. You can assess this by asking them to describe the longest project they have managed to completion. Listen carefully and assess the quality, difficulty and outcome of the project.

Innate, Trait Based Talents – We use the Five Insights of Enduring Leaders framework to determine the basic strengths and weaknesses of leaders in this area compared to the type of position they are being considered for (headroom, fit or new role). The five trait based competencies that are part of the framework are: Connection, Passion and Timing, Seeing and Impacting Systems-Level Issues, Comfort with Change, and Confidence. If a new role is going to require working and acting alone or without much support, you’ll want to find someone who has confidence. Or, if the role is going to require a lot of people management, they better be pretty solid at the trait of connection. Ask open-ended questions that allow for a discussion about what traits they are more and less comfortable using to determine if the person fits the role.

Maturity or Dysfunctional Behavior – Asking questions about the trials and adversity the High Po has confronted during their careers will give you a sense of whether their “growing edge” is related to developing additional experience and knowledge (maturity) or learning to better control specific behaviors that are innate and counter-productive (dysfunction). Next assess the severity of the maturity or dysfunction issue. Maturity can be developed, dysfunction has to be controlled or eliminated. How much time and energy do you have for either (or both)? How high is the risk compared to the reward of placing the person in the new role given their specific growing edge?

Look Around – Scan for Results
We have also learned to include a careful review of the results and status of the High Po’s current job assignment in the overall assessment. Do they usually hit their productivity, budget, P&L targets? Do they usually achieve their professional goals? Are their goals aligned with the strategy of the organization? Find out how people feel about working with them. You don’t need to say “Tell me about how you like working with Bill?” which automatically sets a tone of judgment and evaluation. Instead, consider asking questions like “tell me what it’s like to be a member of this team?” or “when was the last time someone acknowledged your good work?”

Make the Process Transparent
Do your best to have the assessment process be as transparent as possible. This may seem counter to the above sentence about talking to others about their views of someone, but it isn’t. Asking associates or employees of the High Po to “tell” on their colleague or boss is different than having them tell you about how they feel about their team and work environment. Frequently its possible to say…”I want to help Jim continue to grow and be successful, so I’d like to ask you a few questions about what its like working with him” Don’t confuse keeping the final outcome of your assessment confidential with the need to be secretive about the process itself. Let the High Po know what you’re doing and reassure them that they don’t need to be or act differently to be successful. Most of us are not nearly as good at masking or hiding our intentions, and the result of doing so breeds distrust and insecurity. Is it worth it?

The science of assessing the skills and traits of a High Po is relatively straight forward. The art is learning to objectively interpret what you hear and observe so you can accurately compare the role you are trying to fill with the candidate for the job.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
-Albert Einstein

In response to most of my client’s expectations, I often seek ways to help them connect their efforts to their results with data, metrics, and information. Can we “prove” that a certain change here in a company, or an investment there, really has the impact we desire? In many cases, leaders I am working with seek to refine or transform their organizational strategy, culture and personal leadership impact. These invitations to offer perspective and provocative questions are an honor that I do not take lightly—that of being entrusted to be part of the inner circle of the most significant challenges and opportunities facing business owners or executives. In a strange dance of paradox, that which they most seek to impact is often impossible to actually measure, or count.
We try to measure by gathering data, conducting surveys, recording anecdotal information, looking at the bottom-line, and various other efforts to prove impact. Nonetheless, the measures are often insufficient and flawed, leaving no proof.

In these instances where our measures fail to validate the efforts in a straight-line way, the results are usually still, confusingly, startlingly evident to all involved. For example, a large entertainment company sought to transform their culture to match their renowned, playful, spirited products, and we gamely measured and assessed over a period of 4 years. The data told a story of progress with some conflicting information that had the net effect of skepticism in senior leaders about whether their efforts achieved through rigorous effort, really made a difference. They had applied the tools of coaching, learning, dialogue, strategy planning, organizational design, and proactive culture creation in their company, and wanted to see gains numerically. With erratic results, the senior team discussed their overall progress:

“I can tell things are different here because of the kinds of questions people ask me now that they didn’t before.”

“I can’t believe the energy level of my employees now that their goals are clearly articulated and shared.”

“With the attention we have given to how we meet and plan, everything runs more smoothly from meetings to ideation.”

“I, and my employees, just look forward to coming to work again!”

These folks knew in their gut that their efforts were having an impact on their organization, no matter what the data was telling them. The changes they experienced were visceral, profound, and existed in the realm connecting thoughts and strategies to emotions and feelings. There is a growing body of research showing that feeling and reason is entwined. Our thoughts, beliefs and assumptions about the world directly affect our feelings. If we think the things we are doing to affect change are making a change, than we feel progress, no matter what traditional measurement is telling us.

Nowhere is this more significant that in the realm of growing leadership capacity in a company for better results. While there are myriad behaviors that leaders must refine to maximize their effectiveness, there are seven that I currently see enacted over and over again with those leaders whose companies are thriving in this hard economy, which I have listed below. These areas of effort are almost impossible to count, but countless rewards come to those who practice them.

1. Self reflect
Two fundamental questions (Who am I? and Who am I with you?) when internalized can have a profound impact on how a senior leader shows up at work day-to-day. Looking in the mirror, really looking, for beauty and imperfection, is the only way to really know about our own impact.

2. Speak your truth
It is easy to mask our real feelings, especially the unsavory and challenging ones such as “I disagree” or “I am frustrated”. Courageous leaders in CEO and top positions in organizations relentlessly name that which they feel, even when difficult, enabling clear decisions, strong partnerships, and transparency.

3. Tolerate ambiguity
Life is not black and white. Shades of grey are where the interesting points are, and it benefits leaders to lean into their own ambiguity and that of others in order not to oversimplify, or come across as unauthentic.

4. Pick what you won’t do
Despite countless hours evaluating what to do in their organizations, the most effective leaders I work with spend equal time considering what they won’t do, thereby conserving energy and focusing their efforts.

5. Find time to think
Time is, without a doubt, the most precious resource of business leaders and owners. There is never enough of it in the day, and many work hard to preserve work life balance amidst great performance pressure. Giving oneself time to think, not only time to do, is a courageous act that elevates impact of great leaders.

6. Surround yourself with talent
It is hard to measure which employees are extraordinary, but we often just know when a good one comes along. Consciously selecting the best and the brightest to surround yourself with is an enabler of results, and requires a centered and sure leader who can leverage great talent with no holds barred.

7. Listen to understand, then listen again
The opposite of “tell,” “ask” is a rich tool for great leaders. Through listening, they are able to ferret out complexities, understand diverse perspectives, and evolve better decisions every time.

Watching skilled and savvy leaders in organizations do what they do to grow and expand and innovate in their space, these seven behaviors stand out again and again as litmus tests to effectiveness. The results accomplished by practicing these acts are not an easy dashboard to draw or metric to report on. Rather, we simply know when they are at play, and it counts.

I find myself continuously working in the realm of trust with clients. My work focuses on helping them learn the skills of trusting others such as delegation and release of control and on demonstrating the traits that engender more trust from others like talking honestly and demonstrating vulnerability when the stakes are high. Trust is ephemeral, complex and subjective, but we know it in our gut when it exists, and our hearts break when it gets violated.
Much has been written about trust, and it’s importance in teams, in companies, in partnership, in families. There are many theories about how trust grows, how it erodes, and how difficult it is to rebuild when it has been fractured.
We tend to speak of trust as if it is always an incremental, layered upon itself process. It is as if we hold a picture in our minds that trust is like a layer cake that builds on itself with each trusting act we seem to expect that over a long period of time, we will end up with a picture-perfect bakery confection of trust, perfect and tidy and decorated with sugar icing and rose petals.

Clients I work with, however, have shown me something completely different. Using the cake metaphor, I imagine trust growing between a boss and employee like that first layer, and then the boss says something without empathy and WHAM there is a hole in that perfect first layer. Together they rebuild the base with frosting, and add another layer of cake, only for the employee to have a bad day and accidentally shake the boss, and so on. So over time, they end up with a confused mass of cake and icing and decorations in a heap on the plate…original, delicious, and fresh, but nowhere near perfect.

I have decided the creation of trust at work is a two-steps forward, one back process. It happens as a direct result of acts of vulnerability and authenticity, clear communication, competence, and clarity. It builds, one act on another, but not in a linear sequence. We might cruise along with openness and heart, and then accidentally step into a betrayal of trust that annoys at best or wounds at worst. I have come to think of it as an invisible fiber that is evidence of both intention and their impact. It has at its core, emotional awareness, care, and willingness to be “in” with one another. The fiber is paradoxically fragile and strong as steel. It can be frayed and bent and torn, and yet every repair strengthens its core. It behooves leaders to think of trust as a commodity that is worthy of their conscious investment daily. With it, people follow, innovate, share their best selves, and will lean towards the possibility of partnership. Without it, people will turn away, give up, hold back, hide, and retreat. At these times, we will find ourselves alone, untrusting and untrusted.

The fallacy then, to me, is expecting the creation of trust with others to be linear. It is not. It is variable, dynamic, and tender, while also being resilient and powerful. To nurture trust with those we lead and with whom we partner, our own flexibility and courage must show up. Can we tolerate the ambiguity that trust will grow simultaneously fast and slow? Can we imagine that we must enter trusting another before we can expect to be trusted? Can we refrain from not retreating back to not trusting in faith that the fiber is only frayed not severed?

In our work, we spend a lot of time trying to understand what, exactly, makes people think the way they think.  For organizations to change and for leaders to be effective, this understanding is critical, and it’s incredibly imprecise. People can witness the same event – a speech or a presentation for example – and although they hear exactly the same words, each person’s interpretation of what was said and what was meant is invariably different.  Yet, in human behavior, there are some shared ways of thinking that arise in organizations, societies and in fact entire cultures. In our parlance, we call these shared opinions or beliefs “mental models”. Building shared mental models in organizations is one of a leader’s most important responsibilities, and one that is frequently overlooked and underrated.

Musician, conductor, singer and artist Bobby McFerrin proved this point at the World Science Conference in 2009 when he demonstrated the universally accepted, completely unspoken mental model most of share without even knowing it. It is, of all things, the traditional five note pentatonic scale.  Many of you may not even know you know the pentatonic scale, check this out…In Search of A Common Chorus .

See!  You DO know what the pentatonic scale is and you didn’t even know it, just like the audience in the video.  The question from the conference discussion is, were we born with that knowledge or did we acquire it? The answer is generally accepted as “a little of both” but in either case, the video is a brilliant example of how we each share a common mental model – or a common chorus, yet we may not even know it.

One of the most important jobs of a leader is to help people create and share common mental models.  In business-speak, we call this “creating alignment” and it is of course critical to understanding and executing on a plan. Not having alignment around core issues is expensive and risky for any organization, and how each of us goes about creating it is different.  Coersion doesn’t work – convincing someone to agree through force-of-will becomes a battle. Repetition doesn’t work; we usually become deaf to hearing the same message again and again. “Selling” alignment can work but unless people believe what they are aligning towards, pay only lasts a short while.  What does seem to work, and what the pentatonic scale example confirms, is that people align around a common mental model when it becomes intrinsic to their day-to-day worlds.  We knew what note to sing when Bobby McFerrin jumped up or down the imaginary keyboard not because he showed us – he didn’t – but because we know the pentatonic scale and knowing it has become intrinsic. How? Repeated exposure to the music that uses that scale. Pentatonic scales are very common and are found all over the world. The scale has its origins in Celtic folk music, Hungarian folk music, West African music, African-American spirituals, Gospel music, American folk music, Jazz, American blues and rock music.

When McFerrin moved, so did our voices, in unison, aligned around a common scale, and most of us did so without any conscious thought. Mental models that bring delight and spark creativity in us are especially easy to learn, so the metaphor could extend even further to as a calling of leadership. A good plan should bring out the best in people and when it does, alignment is easier to create.

How perfect.  Part of a leader’s job is creating a common chorus in their organizations.

Whether the difference is one of personality, or culture, or gender, or age, or race, or ethnic background, nothing leads to breakdowns on teams more than an inability to deal with differences. Now more so than ever, generational difference (age) is prevail ant as a workplace issue. Recently, I had a taste of how our clients must feel on a daily basis as the clash of generations played itself out…my opportunity was spending 7 days with ten very smart, very confident, very busy 24-year-old millennials.

My own 24-year-old millennial son invited me to join he and his friends on a 7-day wilderness raft trip in Idaho. With over 100 miles of class II to IV rapids, the river’s whitewater challenges were formidable, but I discovered that being in the older minority with this group was harder than any of the river’s rapids.

What made the trip difficult for me was, quite frankly, because these young adults are so, well…different than me.  At 53, I’m in the back half of my career; most of my expedition mates are embarking on their first full time career position. I’m happily married, and have been parenting for almost 30 years; they were single, happy to be so, and childless.  I was hoping to get through the trip without making a fool of myself or breaking any major bones; they were saying things like “let’s take the hero route!” or seeing how high up a cliff they could jump off, into the water, without breaking something. Hoping to have some status in the group other than being so old, I harbored a secret desire to be asked to talk about my 30+years of river running experience.  Forget it, they had no frame of reference for 30 years of anything!

In these troubled times of unemployment, and uncertainty, most of ‘the kids” are meaningfully engaged in jobs and pursuits that were both interesting and varied. Those who are not employed are either prepping for the GRE and graduate school, or the final stages of interviewing for jobs.   Three of them work for non-profits as naturalists and educators.  Two work as researchers and analysts in the clean tech and energy efficiency arena.  Another two work as professional river guides so they could spend most of their time outdoors running rivers. One is applying to a masters program in business and social justice.  One is finishing a Ph.D. program in Chemistry at Yale.

In spite of how interesting they were, frankly, I found myself missing people whose backgrounds and history more closely resembled my own. For a few brief more years, I will be in the majority demographic in the work place, then my group’s dominance and privilege at work will be history.  How ill prepared I feel to take my place in the minority, and how excited these young people seem to assume their roles in our future.  The trip brought home a heightened awareness that I’d better get my head wrapped around letting go and learning to be a member of the crowd if I want to be relevant, included or noticed. What generated connection and camaraderie with this group was each person’s ability to adapt to the moment, not the ability to seize control of it. Each person’s value in this crowd lay in their ability to contribute to its flowing, dynamic, eclectic vibe. The color of my hair and my age didn’t isolate me from the group, I discovered.  Any loneliness I experienced was more the result of my own inflexibility in adapting to a new way of socializing and relating.

I am happy to report, at the very end of the trip, my frail, graying, 53 year old ego did get one strong affirmation. During our introductions to each other on the first night, we were asked to describe what animal we would pick to be if we had to , and said I wanted to be a grizzly whale because of their power and dominance (grizzly) and benevolent gentleness (whales).

By the end of the trip, the group had named themselves the “Grizzly Whales”.

Maybe I’ll fit in after all!