A leader’s team may consist of different types of workers. For some of these workers, it’s just a means to an end, but there are others who believe that the work they do, matters. These workers demonstrate complete integrity and dedication towards their jobs and have a deep understanding of their organization’s goals. So how should a leader go about discovering and developing them?
Contributors

• • Helen Norris, Chief Information Officer, Chapman University
  • Tom Kolditz, Founding Executive Director, The Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University & Author “In Extremis Leadership: Leading as if Your Life Depended on It”

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:22]:

Hello, and welcome to the segment on CIO Talk Network. To learn more about the show, visit www.ciotalknetwork.com, and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, and look for this show as #real gems and #team MGM TVG’s team management. The topic for today’s show is Discovering And Polishing The Real Gems In Your Team, and our guest for today’s show is Tom Kolditz, who is the founding executive director of the Door Institute for New Leaders at the RISE University. Hi, Tom. How are you?

Tom Kolditz [00:00:58]:

I’m terrific.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:59]:

Great. Great to have you, and we also have Helen Norris, who’s the Chief Information Officer at Chapman University. Hi, Helen. How are you doing?

Helen Norris [00:01:07]:

I’m doing great today. Thank you, Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:10]:

So the topic the reason we picked up today is because, of course, we have spoken a lot about leadership and about team development and look at the heroes, make them better, but there are many other heroes who may be working behind the scenes or perhaps they even go undiscovered, so they don’t get as much attention. They don’t get as many opportunities, and we do not really maximize the potential of each member that belongs to the team. We wanted to talk about that. So that said, first question is for you, Helen. When we look at many such situations where squeaky wheels get the most attention or a few heroes or star performers that you identify, we keep working to make them better, but then there are many others who could be even doing better than the star performers if given the right type of attention and grooming. Where do we drop the ball?

Helen Norris [00:02:03]:

Well, that’s a good question. I think we do tend to pay attention to people where we’ve seen results in the past. So we tend to go back to if we’ve had a good experience, a staff member has done a great job on a particular project. When another project comes along, we tend to go, oh, what about Mary or that particular staff member? So I think that’s part of it. In IT, our end users become very comfortable with somebody who’s done a great job in a particular area, and they want to constantly work with that person. It feels like maybe the easiest road to go. It’s quicker to work with that person who I’ve worked with before. So I think to get away from that, a couple of techniques you can use is to pair people up, to put together a person who’s seen as a star performer and a person who hasn’t been seen as a star performer before and have them both work on a particular task or a project, giving a team an opportunity to get to know the second person in that role, and to get that same great experience with them as they had with the first individual.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:26]:

So based on Helen’s response, Tom, if you notice that what Helen suggested would really work well, assuming that you have also been given equal emphasis on who are you having in your team. That means every member, but in many cases, we find even the leaders or managers getting comfortable with a few star performers, have them become their lieutenant, or not exactly the yes men, but people who they would go to every time versus giving equal opportunity to other people. So this gap, is it a function of a manager getting complacent?

Tom Kolditz [00:04:02]:

Well, yeah. I think so. I think it is a form of complacency, and I think that managers that pull people out of the team and give them a tacit leadership role have to be very, very careful with that. Because as you said before, some people look good relative to the other people on the team, and sometimes that’s at the cost of the team, and, likewise, much quieter people can actually be making the entire group work better and smarter and faster. I think one of the things that we could do more of that’s actually very simple and very inexpensive is to ask team members to rate one another. There’s a terrific instrument that was published in the open literature just a few years ago called the CATME-B. It’s a single sheet of paper where a number of team members rate themselves and each of their team members on very specific behavioral actions. So it’s not so much an opinion survey about how someone’s performance was on the team. It just asks very specifically, did this person do this behavior, this behavior, this behavior? We used that quite effectively at Yale with teams that were working on business cases in a competition. For four years running now, we had injected this technique into the teams that were in their international case competition, so we had to do this in 6 languages for 12 teams, but it was a terrific way to give those team members information about themselves, in a validated way. I mean, this is a well-validated research instrument, but it’s simple enough that the average person can pick it up and start using it from day one.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:20]:

So, Helen, if you look at yourself as the leader, and you’ve got your lieutenants who are managing a number of other individuals in the organization, you may just look at how the results are coming out for the most part versus micromanaging and seeing how your managers, your talents who are also leaders, are handling their team members. So is there a way to make sure that these people are doing the job they’re supposed to, which is to identify, discover, and then polish the real gems versus the ones who are just a few star performances? Even if you’re getting results, you could always get better results if you did that, but is there some active checks and balances or effort being made towards it?

Helen Norris [00:07:05]:

That’s a good question. I think there are a couple of ways that you can improve the performance or find the hidden gems as well as looking at the results. As you pointed out, as a leader with lieutenants, you tend to look at the results and note that this person’s meeting their deadlines. This person’s teams are delivering a project on time and other key performance indicators. However, to dig a little bit deeper probably requires taking time as a leader to really observe the team closely, perhaps spend some time sitting with the team, watching how they work together. I love the idea that Tom raised about having the teams rate each other because things come up that you wouldn’t necessarily see from the key performance indicators.

Helen Norris [00:08:01]:

So, taking advantage of tools like that, doing 360 evaluation. In IT, most of our work involves serving people throughout the organization, including people outside of the teams on those evaluations of the behavior, I think, could add another dimension to what you see there. So that’s one way that you could deep dive a little bit deeper and find the hidden gems in there, but I do think that there’s still a lot to be said for kind of the old fashioned approach of observing the team, spending time with and in their project workspaces or in project team meetings to see where there are quiet stars that aren’t being heard, and I think that could be very helpful.

Sanjog Aul [00:09:00]:

So to that, Tom, do you think when you sit in a meeting and you find a couple of very talkative or extroverted individuals who are giving ideas, there are a few people who are silent, they may say fewer things, but they are very meaty in terms of the value they are bringing. Or even if they don’t say something, their body language, etc. will tell they’re itching to tell something or contribute, but something is holding them back. How do you, because if they don’t talk, you don’t know if they’re a gem or not, and then if they do talk, you have to evaluate compared to what many other people who are talking to them are saying and weigh in terms of the value that they’re bringing, even in terms of fewer words or fewer ideas.

Tom Kolditz [00:09:43]:

There are a lot of ways to bring in people who ordinarily wouldn’t speak up. One technique I’ve used a lot to determine the vulnerability of my organizations to some sort of really catastrophic or negative outcome is to pull the team into a room and give them each a 4 by 6 card and have them imagine a real fiasco for our organization and to anonymously write down how this happened. What set of circumstances have we created that makes us vulnerable to a big fall, and when you do that, when you then pull those in anonymously and read through them, often you find that individuals have a lot of insights as to the vulnerabilities of the organization, but they’re not necessarily speaking up. This usually results, if you don’t do this sort of check, in some kind of a big problem happening, and then there’s always that person standing off in the corner going, well, I knew that wasn’t gonna work, and as a leader, it’s your job to find that person before the problem occurs. So I think allowing people to give some anonymous input on hard problems gets some really creative solutions that even some of the higher performers might be hesitant to talk about in open forum, but they’re willing to write it down anonymously and pass it along to the leader.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:15]:

So one is to talk about the things which you see. Another is to identify people who otherwise may be talkative and say, okay, I’m the first one to jump on any project, etc, but otherwise, they have that 9 to 5 type of mentality. Not the number of hours that they spend, but this is a job, and so this is interesting where some people may be most talkative, show the most initiative, but they have a mindset of this being a job. So what they eventually produce is not in as much alignment with what’s in the best interest of the organization. How do you differentiate between what somebody shows as a behavior and their true mindset? And that’s where the opportunity will be to identify gaps. Let’s explore that more. Please stay tuned. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:12:12]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sun Jog Al how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog all at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Al. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:13:06]:

Welcome back. So, Tom, how do we get through this facade of someone looking very actively involved but has a mindset of a regular 9 to 5 job?

Tom Kolditz [00:13:19]:

Yeah. I think the way that you get through that is by asking people to articulate back to you as a leader what your intent is. To be able to describe back to you what is the ideal end state, what’s the purpose of the activity, and I think what you’ll find is that the people who are going through the motions have a really hard time doing that, but people who understand where their leader is trying to get to, who have a strong sense of what their intentions are and especially what the outcome is supposed to look like, those people are freed up to operate very independently, and I think you’ll see them working with independence and passion as compared to the people that are just putting in time.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:13]:

So, when you look at it, Helen, from your team’s perspective and when you identify that there are a few people who are otherwise showing a lot of vocal contribution or they are just saying things, but they are not following through, do you think we should just right away label them as people who are trying to put up a facade and they’re not the right people, or there’s an opportunity for them to be converted as well?

Helen Norris [00:14:43]:

I think my approach is that there is always an opportunity for a person to turn a person around, within reason, obviously, but I think my first approach would be to work with them to try to figure out why they’re just going through the motion. Perhaps take a critical look at myself as a leader, to see if there’s something that I failed to do to articulate the vision and the goals that we’re trying to achieve. In fact, I think the way to really get people to buy into the goals is to have them be involved in the development of and the articulation of the strategy, the vision, and the goals. So to the extent that you can pull in people, those quiet people, those people who appear to just be going through the motions, pull them into the design of the strategy, to the identification of the goals for the organization. Then you can truly get buy in. People will always truly buy in if they feel they were part of the goal setting in the first place. So I think that’s one technique that you can take, and secondly, if a person comes on after a vision has already been set, it’s important when you go through that interview process that the person who’s coming into the organization understands at the time of the interview what it is we’re trying to accomplish as a team. If they don’t understand that when they’re coming through the interviews, maybe too late when they get here to bring them on board. So I will try to include people in the design of the goals and the articulation of the goals and then move forward with that with them as fully engaged members of the team.

Sanjog Aul [00:16:39]:

Now, if you look at, Tom, the way people do certain things, that also makes or breaks the way they would perform. So they may be very articulate. They may be showing all the zeal in the world, but the way they get things done or the way they think in the approach sometimes gets stuck in whatever they thought is the right thing and that becomes their shortcoming. In terms of polishing, how do you get them over this mindset where they’re stuck?

Tom Kolditz [00:17:13]:

Yeah. I think that what you have to do is pull them out of the context that’s reinforcing that kind of routinized thinking and give them new and different challenges that they haven’t had before, particularly if you can put them with other high performers in teams, and this is good for an organization because it usually involves a certain amount of cross training or cross learning, but I think the best way is to shake them up a little bit by pulling them out of that comfort zone that’s let them think that way. I think it’s also important for a leader to reflect back to them that you do see that consistency that may not be creative or good in their products, and sometimes just putting it in people’s awareness is enough that they can check themselves and begin to adjust.

Sanjog Aul [00:18:21]:

So we’ve always seen, Helen, that there are some people who almost end up shadowing the other, otherwise being the real gem potential. How do you get over that? Because you are not there every moment. Those people have that tendency. It’s almost like bullies in the school who themselves may have lower self esteem, and that’s why they’re bullying, but here, they’re not bullying. It’s just that they have a strong personality. They may be good performers, but they are unknowingly shadowing the other people who have the potential to really contribute and become the real gems.

Helen Norris [00:18:59]:

That’s an interesting situation to deal with. The person who’s kind of filling up the room at every occasion and not giving other people an opportunity to shine. I think a couple of things that you can do to accommodate that is, first of all, work with the other people in the room to make sure that they feel that they have a way to speak up and to be heard, but really, I’d like to build on Tom’s point. One of the things that Tom mentioned is sometimes people are completely unaware that their behavior is problematic in some way, and they’ve never heard it before, especially for a person who speaks up a lot or comes across as a strong personality. It’s very difficult for a person to give that individual feedback. As a leader, I think it’s our responsibility to give the feedback to that person that their behavior is challenging for others. We always think in my organizations of feedback being a gift. A lot of times people think of feedback as being something negative, you’re going to give criticism to somebody, but really, you’re giving that person a gift of letting them know that their behavior is challenging for other people. The gift, the feedback doesn’t have to feel personal. It can be phrased in ways like, your relationship with your colleagues would be better if you started doing this or if you stopped doing that and really take it from the other perspective instead of saying, your colleagues would feel better if you did this. My relationship with you would be better if we did that. I recognize that  is hard to that’s very time consuming, and as you pointed out, the leader is not around all the time, and that’s why I think it’s very important for us to build the leaders throughout the organization who can continually give that feedback to their colleagues in a nonthreatening way.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:20]:

So, Tom, if you look at many such situations where, suppose in Helen’s team this is happening, that’s one, but the person who is a real champ but is not the type who’s gonna speak up and the people who are shadowing this individual or a set of individuals are the ones, of course, not going to even realize that they are doing it. Not always where Helen is present, then how do we uncover those situations?

Tom Kolditz [00:21:50]:

Observation is the first step there. If you’re concerned about that in a team is to simply watch them and even better, videotape them. Because often, when you play back a tape like that, just unedited, just have people watch from a third party perspective what’s going on in the team, some of that behavior becomes not only obvious, but in some instances somewhat comical, and people can see what they’re doing, and they can go from there, but here’s the thing. It’s almost as if what we’re trying to figure out is how do you take an introvert who’s a great team contributor and make them more pronounced or more recognized, and in fact, that’s really not necessary. It’s about the team performance. There’s a great case study that’s out there from the late nineties of a guy named Jack Jeffries who built a competitive skydiving team called Arizona Airspeed. From the ground up, he wanted to build the best skydiving team in the world. So he got all of the best skydivers from around the world and put them all together on this team, and it was an absolute disaster. Even though they had all the talent, the dynamics were such that they couldn’t win. It wasn’t until he went back to scratch and found people who worked together as a team well, and then trained them and made them competitive, that he was able to win with that team, and it became the most winning competitive skydiving team in the world. So I think we see that on our own teams too, where we pay too much attention to stars and individual performance in the context of the team, when in fact it’s the team product by which people should be judged.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:59]:

So, Helen, when you look at any of such situations where something like this is happening and how it’s a great idea for someone to report, but is that practical is what I would like to ask Helen. When you are trying to get people to do what they’re supposed to do in their regular day lives, you have to observe or you have to have another set of eyes deployed within that organization, which is below you.

Helen Norris [00:24:23]:

I think it’s really about putting together a great team, and when the team is working well together, when the dynamics are right, I believe that the team members become accountable to one another. It’s not about the leader necessarily having a set of eyes that’s keeping things working. It’s that the team members are committed to each other, and they want to do the right thing for the team as Tom pointed out. So in that case, the leader really becomes, I think, a coach of the team. Our role as leaders is really to provide the opportunity for the team to be successful and having the team be self-managing and accountable to each other. That to me is a true high performance team. A high performing team is when the team members understand the goal as set, and understand their role within the organization. I agree with Tom that everyone’s role is a little bit different. Not everyone on the team has to be an outspoken superstar and then is accountable to each other. Then you’ll find that teams will work together to ensure that they have each other’s back and to ensure that they fill in for one another in the right place. You can see examples of this in sports. A very current example, if you look at the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, part of the reason that they’re successful is they have great superstar players, but they have other players who are willing to take a bench position in order to have the team be successful, and that’s because I think they’re accountable to each other, not necessarily because the coach talked them into it.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:31]:

So point taken, Helen. Now Tom coming to you, let’s compare the teams. If you talk NBA, you got 10 people. You got one coach who has got equal access and equal visibility of each person in the team. Come to an organization where you got hundreds or thousands of people, and then you got layers of hierarchy where you are supposed to manage through the process. Not exactly the same, and at the same time, we are making an assumption, and we will go into the break right now, but we’re making an assumption that if we work towards making it a great team and which is again somehow that great team concept is put in place then this discovering and polishing the real gems in your team, the topic that you’re discussing becomes a moot point, but, frankly, the reality is that there are things happening in teams all the time in bigger organizations where you have this issue where people are shadowing the others, and then there are people who are real gems which get undiscovered or sometimes they walk away because they don’t meet their potential. How do we handle in real life? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:27:52]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sun Jog Al how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. If you want to keep up with IT thought leadership, listen to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog aul at ciotalknetwork.com. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:46]:

Welcome back. So, Tom, we painted a picture of a smaller team where you have equal visibility so you can get them to a high performing team like an NBA, but in real organizations, hundreds of workers, multiple levels of hierarchy, and managers not the same way and not at the same level of intellectual and emotional intelligence and leadership quality as a top leader, then the team may not really get that high performance level as we would like to see. How do we get over this hurdle when we are working in large organizations?

Tom Kolditz [00:29:22]:

Well, I think the first step is to value managers who can manage teams, who can lead teams and get higher performance out of them. So that’s the first thing, and I think there are two really important characteristics to look at, whether they’re in the high performing team members or in high performing management, and the first thing is they have to evidence an understanding of and promote actions that are indicative of the next level in the hierarchy. It’s often a mistake that we judge people’s value and performance by how well they do only at their level or in their team. So the focus needs to be more on potential to serve at higher levels rather than performance at a given level, and then the second thing that’s really indicative that senior managers in large organizations have to look out for is, are individuals who, by their collaborative style and by their working across the hierarchy, can help make all boats rise. In other words, they’re not just good at creating value in their own team, in their own lane, but they’re people who start sharing ideas across the organization so that the greater organization gets better. Often it’s the case when you’ve got these sort of spotlight superstars, they don’t share ideas very well. They’re a little insecure, so they keep their good ideas in their team and try to make their team the best it can possibly be. Those people are limited in terms of potential in the organization, and unfortunately, sometimes managers who don’t have a lot of experience fall victim to that. They see these extreme high performers that are doing great in their team, and they think that person’s gonna be good for the organization overall when in fact that person is really just focused on their own ambitions.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:38]:

So how do we get over so while there are some good leaders and performers, we’ll always have a mixed bag. So if someone is unfortunately under a manager who is getting there, but it’s not truly there in terms of being able to lead and manage the troops, then these issues with either hidden gems or the gems who are identified, but nobody is really taking care of them because there are some other people who are still in the limelight. Helen, when you are dealing with such a situation, what is your recourse?

Helen Norris [00:32:13]:

That’s a tough situation to deal with. I want to build on something that Tom said and that you said that we have managers at different levels of the organization, and we need to value the managers who work across the organization and collaborate really well. First of all, I think management is really a skill that can be learned. So I think it’s very important that when we move people into management positions and even people who have been there in management for a long time, it’s important to realize that you have to provide some education and training to managers in how to manage and how to lead. I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve walked into, especially in technical organizations, where a great technical performer has been moved into a management position, and it’s as if because they were a great network analyst or whatever, they’re now the supervisor or the manager, and it should just magically happen, and it doesn’t. So I think that’s how we end up in the situation you described where we have a manager who doesn’t know how to nurture a hidden gem or somebody who can deliver a lot more value than they are. So I think providing the necessary training and skills building to the management team is critical. I think it’s important to bring in, to send those people to training, to perhaps have mentoring situations where you have one great manager in the organization who maybe can manage and mentor the other manager who’s perhaps a little bit weaker to help them with their skills to manage the talent that’s on their team. So I think encouraging cross-mentoring situations in that instance where both the manager and the person who’s frustrated by a more junior or less experienced manager can get some coaching from elsewhere in the organization can be very helpful, providing management skill training to the manager can be very helpful, and ultimately, if the person is not a strong manager and it doesn’t appear to learn those skills, you do have to consider whether or not they’re right for a leadership role and perhaps make a change in that situation.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:59]:

Now with whatever you just mentioned, Helen, there would be, of course, the managers that you’re talking about, but then when the time got tough or if there are other challenges where even the managers are, for example, there is a restructuring, or there are some other pressures where even the managers are buckling, then what? How would you make sure that the people below them are not losing their true potential?

Helen Norris [00:35:28]:

That’s really challenging because you do want to respect the manager’s situation and not make the situation worse by alienating them or isolating them. I think using some external coaching to provide some additional support for the manager while at the same time providing a different way for the superstar performer or the hidden gem performer to perhaps work on a different team and a different project. Many of us have matrix-type organizations where a person may report to one manager but work on a project team that’s led by another manager. Perhaps moving one of those people into a project team, if you have the opportunity to do that, to give them a more varied set of experiences in the workplace can help with some of that frustration in that situation.

Tom Kolditz [00:36:44]:

You know, I really agree with Helen’s point about the coaching piece. We’re seeing a revolution in the use of coaching at lower and lower levels in organizations. Here at Rice University, our intention next fall is to offer a professional leadership coach to every sophomore in the school, and in business settings, I see managers and others who would not think of fielding a weekend softball team without having coaches involved, but for some reason, they think they can fumble through a multimillion dollar business project with a team and not allocate any kind of coaching effort to that. It just doesn’t make sense anymore. So I think you’re gonna see more and more people taking advantage of professional coaching to make sure some of these individual managers are successful and that their teams run well.

Sanjog Aul [00:37:44]:

So, Tom, go ahead.

Helen Norris [00:37:47]:

Oh, Tom, I agree. I think the professional coach has true value for managers at all levels of the organization, and I think as leaders in the organization, more and more of our job is coaching. I really see that my role, the vast majority of my role, is coaching managers who report to me. Because as Sanjog mentioned earlier, it’s a big organization. It’s not a little team. There are people that have to be managed by various managers throughout the organization. So coaching with external coaches, but helping leaders develop their coaching skills, I think, is really critical also because we have coaching moments every single day, where we observe something or we have our manager come to us and say, what should I do in this situation? It’s incumbent on leaders in the organization to coach their managers. So I feel that we have to learn coaching skills too, and there are coaching moments every day. It’s not about managing, not about directing, it’s about coaching.

Tom Kolditz [00:39:09]:

No. That’s exactly right. We’re doing the same here at Rice now. Concurrent with this major effort for our students, we’ve created a coach certification course in our School of Continuing Studies, and so that’s all about teaching managers how to coach.

Sanjog Aul [00:39:28]:

And, see, interestingly, you talk about coaching, and I’ll share with you some data points. I’ve spoken to quite a few leaders, and the coaching typically is provided to managers, but not to those workers who actually are supposed to be either mentored or being improved or groomed to improve their skills. Now the differences between coaching and mentoring is mentoring comes from a manager who also has an agenda to get them to do the job, but a coach really objectively looks at their issues, their concerns, etc. So with all of that said, if someone, especially someone who is a hidden gem, and if they were to be mentored, the fact that their hidden gem is the manager is not able to either identify them or they’re not able to groom them or polish them, and the organizations don’t want to invest in coaching that field staff, if you will, or a programmer, then what are we doing? We are trying to develop a manager who then somehow, somewhere will actually end up, and this is like flipping a coin, that they will be able to identify, discover, and polish those real gems. Is this helping or is there another way out? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Speaker 0 [00:40:56]:

Today, enterprise technology is both strategic and global. Each week on CTN CIO Talk Network, IT thought leaders from around the world share their experience with listeners as they discuss with Sun Jog Al how they are trimming costs and partnering with business to innovate and help IT become more competitive, better care for customers, and improve the corporate bottom line. You are listening to CTN CIO Talk Network with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about our program, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Now back to the show.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:51]:

So welcome back. So, Helen, my question was, as I mentioned before the break, what are your thoughts?

Helen Norris [00:42:00]:

Sure. You know, I do agree that sometimes we focus the coaching on the management team, and sometimes out of, as I think you mentioned, budget necessity, sometimes it simply is a reality that we have limited dollars that allow us to do that, and that does mean that we don’t get the opportunity to drop down to the next level and find people who maybe have some extra leadership as well as other things to offer. So one of the things I think we can do, I’ve seen it work in many organizations, is to develop an internal mentoring and coaching, a formal mentoring and coaching program, especially in large organizations. Many people really would love to serve as mentors and coaches to other people at all levels of the organization, and so you can introduce through your human resources office a program that allows anyone in the organization to become a coach and mentor. They can then in turn provide mentoring across the organization and you encourage that kind of ecosystem of coaching and mentoring at all levels of the organization. There is cost associated with it. You do have to provide support for the mentors and the mentees, but it can really be beneficial for people. In addition, I belong to many organizations where we’ve offered coaching and mentoring in a volunteer capacity. I belong to organizations that are associated with women in technology where often we offer that kind of service to other women in other organizations. People love to be asked to help, and you can find people who will do this mentoring and coaching around the organization for you. I was interested in what Tom said that at Rice, they developed this kind of certificate in leadership and coaching at the university. Having anyone on your staff go through a program like that will be hugely beneficial for the entire organization. So I would just encourage leaders to find creative ways to do that without necessarily having to engage a professional coach at a cost that may be a barrier.

Tom Kolditz [00:44:50]:

I would come from a little different angle on that. We have found that amateur coaches or coaches that aren’t trained to do it, aren’t professionally certified, aren’t that effective. Mentors can help people professionally, but in terms of coaching for performance, we don’t allow anyone to coach in our program for our students unless they’re an International Coach Federation certified coach who’s been educated and trained for it, and the cost can actually be controlled by using coaches as vendors rather than full-time employees. We’re able to coach 500 students, 3 to 5 sessions per semester for the same price as one senior faculty member. It is not a prohibitive cost if it’s something that you want to get done and the net effect of it is really powerful.

Sanjog Aul [00:45:49]:

Now in all of these cases that you just mentioned, there could be a situation where these hidden gems because they are not visibly showing value creation, at least to many, and also there is nothing standing out. Would there be a possibility of such an employee to be allowed to fail? Helen, if that happens, it’s a shame, and it’s also failure of the organization that created a false positive.

Helen Norris [00:46:31]:

Failure is an interesting word because it feels very negative, but I would argue that if an organization never has a failure, then the organization is never taking any risk. So I do think that we should allow employees to fail. That demonstrates that we’ve really tried to stretch them. It’s not every risk that you take is going to be successful. So keep that in mind. I think what’s important is that when you have a failure you respond quickly, that you don’t put a person in a position where they are unsuccessful and then leave them there for an extended period of time where it’s frustrating for them and frustrating for their coworkers. So I do think that we should stretch people and allow them to fail. I think it’s important, however, to ensure that we take those risks where we’re more likely to see failure, projects or initiatives that are less mission critical. Obviously, you don’t want to run the risk of failure or create a risk on a mission critical or highly visible project, but put people in stretch positions, challenge them to work in a different way on a project where when you have a failure, you can recover more easily. I think though when we think about failure, we really think about a person who maybe had a failure one time and learned from it and then recovered and went forth and performed better in the future because that’s the function of failure. The function of failure is for us to learn from it, and when we do it the next time, we do it a little bit differently. When we sometimes ask the question about failure, we’re talking about an employee who constantly can’t deliver and how to deal with that. I think after a failure the person gets improved. How they react to the failure, either they improve or they continue to do the same thing. If they improve, you’ve had a success with that failure. If they don’t, if they continue to do the same thing, then you have a very tough situation where perhaps you have a person who has to be removed from the team or the organization if they continually have the same pattern.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:13]:

And so to that, Tom, I’d like to come to you and say, what if this person was a real gem? But as we said, the very essence of this topic was that they were not discovered and they were not being polished, that’s why they are failing, but you essentially lost a gem who could have been in the making of becoming a superhero, but we fail in the process where we allow them to fail.

Tom Kolditz [00:49:38]:

Well, that organizational perspective is really important. Leaders, every decision a leader makes should make the organization better, and often, a decision to retain somebody after a failure because they do have high potential and perhaps they were unlucky or inexperienced or not well shaped by the organization, you can’t afford to lose people like that. There just aren’t enough hidden high performers that you can afford to fire them. I think around this failure business, the thing that’s important is that public organizational discussions about failure have to be forward looking. It has to be focused on how do we get better next time, but to Helen’s point, and I think anybody who’s ever actually run an organization would agree, there has to be accountability at some point as well, and the key is to make those two conversations separate and independent. So the public organizational forward-looking analysis of that failure, and then in some cases a private accounting for it that identifies the kind of people that Helen was describing that just will not get it. That it really is a dispositional quality of them as an individual rather than a situational manifestation in the organization.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:11]:

One final comment from both of you. Three words, top of mind, for a leader in order for them to be able to work in an environment or basically develop an environment where we are able to, on a regular basis, discover and polish the hidden gems? Starting with you, Helen. Three words.

Helen Norris [00:51:31]:

Three words. Coaching, accountability, and observation.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:41]:

Tom, you cannot repeat your three words.

Tom Kolditz [00:51:44]:

Engaged, aware, and decisive.

Sanjog Aul [00:51:50]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you both, Helen and Tom, for sharing your thoughts about how to discover and polish the real gems in our teams. Thank you so much.

Tom Kolditz [00:52:02]:

Thank you.

Helen Norris [00:52:02]:

Thank you.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:04]:

And listeners, hope you enjoyed the conversations. Hope you’ll go out and actually work towards identifying, discovering, and polishing real gems in your teams. Please like us on Facebook. Search for CIO Talk Radio. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our LinkedIn group. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Network. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care, and God bless.