5 Steps to Define Leadership and Develop Brands

in Emerging Markets

April 18, 2012 - William A. Burke III

One of the most exciting megatrends in business today is the rise of emerging markets. We are now witnessing a profound shift, as countries that were once the source of low-cost manufacturing are now becoming attractive consumer markets in their own right. With so much growth projected in the future, companies are placing big bets on their emerging market strategies. This opportunity makes the need for effective local leadership more critical than ever.

Seventeen years ago, I immersed myself into the Latin American culture as a brand manager for Black & Decker. Living with a family in Costa Rica – where I slept on a straw mattress and went without hot showers – helped shape my view of what it would take to be successful in business there. First hand, I experienced how people lived and worked. I embraced the culture and came to understand the value Central Americans placed on personal relationships. These insights continue to guide the way I conduct business globally.

At Newell Rubbermaid, we have developed an approach for advancing leadership in new markets that has helped guide us. Our brands like Paper Mate and Parker pens, Rubbermaid Commercial Products, Irwin Tools and Lenox saw blades realized double-digit growth in emerging markets in 2011. No matter what products or services you sell, and regardless of your business model, as you look to take your brand globally there are some universal steps that can help lay the foundation for a strong business strategy.

Find Your Leader

When entering a new market, the choice comes down to a local leadership or an expat leadership model. Both choices represent challenges. A local already knows the market and the nuances of doing business in the region, but doesn’t yet have the passion or knowledge of the company’s purpose, culture and business. An expat from headquarters presents the opposite challenge. Either way, success depends on a strong onboarding program and ongoing training, along with a trusted advisor on the ground to provide advice. What doesn’t work, in my experience, is a new hire from outside who has neither the right market nor company knowledge.

Hire Supporting Talent

Once you’ve identified your local leader, you need to build out your organization. That used to mean simply forecasting average sales per employee to estimate how big the team should be and how much it would cost. Today, the concept of workforce planning is much more sophisticated. The key is to ensure that the current positions you are filling are also the ones needed to achieve your future goals. For example, if you want to build a billion-dollar business, are you bringing in people capable of managing at that scale? Too often, companies build the team they need for the short term, rather than think ahead to create the talent pool of their future.

Provide Training

Why does your company exist and what would the world be like without it? These questions sound esoteric, but they are critical to bringing to life a company’s purpose and culture and inspiring passion. Training programs must give the team a reason to believe and that goes a lot deeper than financial goals.

Leaders should think of training emerging market teams in two phases – at home (brand culture) and in-market (cultural connection).

A home training program helps emerging market teams feel a closer connection to the company. For example, in some of our businesses Newell Rubbermaid brings teams to the U.S. to learn on the production floor, in the marketing department and with the sales teams. This also builds relationships that help them navigate the business broadly.

A second phase calls for creating a training and development center within the local market, as we have recently done in Shanghai with our Lenox Institute of Technology to educate both salespeople and customers on the benefits of our products. As teams reach a large scale, sending all employees “home” for training may become cumbersome and expensive. In-country training centers are set up to operate seamlessly to support broad networks.

Share Insights

When you have strong local leadership and a thriving local organization in place, that’s when the magic happens. Rather than information always flowing in one direction from headquarters outward, valuable insights begin to flow back from new markets that can be shared across the entire enterprise.

All too often, marketers go to an outside agency to purchase research, but the best way is to take the time to see for yourself. For instance, our team in Latin America watched how local women cleaned a floor with a squirt bottle and a pole with a rag attached. That resulted in a new product that is now sold globally: a mop with the cleaning liquid built into the stick.

It Starts from the Top

The last critical ingredient to leadership in emerging markets is setting a bold ambition. Every market is like a canvas—there may be many ways to paint it, but the first brushstroke starts with a compelling vision for what is possible. I believe a bold ambition, ideally set directly by the CEO of the company, is critical to providing the passion and inspiration needed for local leadership to go out and color in the lines and make the canvas come alive.

Bold ambitions, by definition, are hard. They require people to stretch out of their comfort zone and embrace not what is probable, but what is possible. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky famously said, “Skate where the puck’s going to be, not where it is.” Bold ambitions define where the puck is going to be, maybe as far as 20 years from now. The companies that bet big on emerging markets 20 years ago are the ones who are riding the next wave of growth today. That’s what true leadership is about: you first have to believe, in order to achieve.

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• Copyright © 2012 Chief Executive Group, LLC. All rights reserved

5 Steps to Assemble Your Own Talent Machine

April 13 2012 by ChiefExecutive.net

Highly successful companies make talent management a high priority. Gallup Management Journal took a look at world-class companies and whittled their employment practices down to 5 important steps to ensure you’re getting and keeping the best talent.

Gallup says, “The most important decision executives make is who they name as manager, at all levels in a company.”

Here are 5 steps you can take to ensure you’re getting the most out of your people:

1. Build a succession plan that works: a succession plan for you and other senior management positions is crucial to keeping your talent machine running. Gallup indicates that many companies don’t have a succession plan, or if they do, it is an outdated one. Make sure to constantly re-evaluate and update your plan so that it’s seamless when you need to execute it.
2. Do an audit of your talent pool: make sure that you have the right employees in the right positions. It’s important to know what you’re working with so that you can make changes if you need to. And there’s no way of implementing a good succession plan if you don’t know how deep your talent pool is.
3. Raise the bar in recruiting and hiring: once you’ve taken care of steps 1 and 2, you know where you need talent. Invest in your recruiting and hiring to fill those voids. Restructure to the hiring process will help you get the right employees and make sure they will fit well into the culture of your company.
4. Provide breakthrough experiences for high-potential managers and leaders: Gallupsuggests that companies count the number of positions in the top 3 levels of the company and multiply that number by 3. That’s how many high-potential managers and leaders you need to identify in preparation for succession. Then interview the star employees that you already have. It will help you find what you’re looking for in your up-and-coming talent.
5. Provide ongoing development, engagement and performance management: invest in your employees and develop them. This will help their performance and keep them engaged until it’s time for them to enter the C-suite.

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• Copyright © 2012 Chief Executive Group, LLC. All rights reserved

4 Keys to Successfully Managing

your Management Team

March 29, 2012 - ChiefExecutive.net

The composition of the so-called “C-suite” has changed over the past 20 years, according to Harvard Business Review writer Gary L. Neilson. In his work as a consultant, he has seen what works to make the way CEOs interact with their management team successful, and also what causes failure.

Key points that enable a management team to succeed include making sure collaboration and honesty are critical elements of how C-Suite members work together and communicate. Keeping conversations focused on supporting the operating model and the processes that reinforce it are also paramount. Here are 4 keys to successfully managing your management team:

1. Listen to the right voices. You can do this by making sure that the person fits the role, not that the role fits the person. The strategy has to be driven forward by people with the proper know-how, not by the people who simply have a voice.
2. Reset the rules of the game. All members of the C-Suite have to be focused on overall company performance, not just on their individual business unit or area. Tie compensation to overall performance, not just silo performance.
3. Stop being the “Decider in Chief.” CEOs too often make their job to decide all strategic and operational issues. Take yourself out of the majority of all decisions where another member of the management team can be the decider.
4. Be prepared to declare “amnesty for the past.” You don’t want your management team constantly defending their course of action and past decisions. Focus on the future, not on the past. If something did not work, don’t force your direct reports to defend it. The past is in the past, and you must only focus on the future and accomplishing your business goals.

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• Copyright © 2012 Chief Executive Group, LLC. All rights reserved

The “Six C’s” Model for Building A Culture of Innovation

April 7, 2011 - Sharon Daniels

Continual innovation may be the most powerful of any competitive advantage for a business. It creates game-changing breakthroughs. Along parallel lines, bit by bit, it also tweaks improvements in existing products, chips away at costs and debugs processes — in every corner of the company, all non-stop. In a turbulent business environment like today’s, it’s essential for helping a business move from playing defense to playing an aggressive, and winning, offense. But innovation can thrive only where there’s a culture of innovation.
Research by AchieveGlobal has identified the particular tactics that businesses are using to build this culture. These tactics are replicable and scalable. We’ve organized them under six headings, each beginning with the letter C. This memory aid can be used to help educate the workforce about the ways the innovation culture is being created — and serve as a guide for managers on innovating in their unit.
Our study examined the practices of companies on Boston Consulting Group’s Top 100 Most Innovative Companies list to learn how they innovate better than their competitors do, the competencies they develop and the behaviors they put in place. The study respondents included managers at all levels in businesses in a wide range of industries in North America, Europe and the Pacific.

1. Collaborative

The great innovators of years past didn’t rely on teamwork. Think Edison, Einstein, Ford. But what worked then doesn’t work any more. With rare exceptions (think Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos), innovation now needs the collaboration of a large and diverse group of people — the larger and more diverse the better.

This is confirmed by a Northwestern University study of 19.9 million scientific papers and 2.1 million patents that showed that the more participants involved in innovation efforts the better the results. What it calls “home run” research papers, or those getting at least 1,000 citations, were six times more likely to come from a team than a sole author. The size of research teams has grown by about 20 percent per decade over the last 50 years.

Technology has become so complex that one lonely scientist can’t master all the knowledge needed to make a breakthrough. It’s been noted in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and elsewhere that its takes many years of effort to become an expert at anything. People’s peak age of creativity continues to increase. The “ideal” age for most scientists is close to 40.

This doesn’t mean responsibility for innovation should be given to a team of 40-year-olds, however. What’s needed is a rich broth that that includes inexperienced people who can bring in a new perspective, together with a socioeconomic mix of people at all levels up and down your supply chain, from different departments, functions, divisions, brands and plants — and especially people who don’t ordinarily work with each other.

What’s also needed for the mix are personalities that include the analytic as well as the imaginative. Dr. Stanley Crooke, CEO of Isis Pharmaceuticals, deliberately includes people with eccentricities in the company’s drug development efforts. “Whenever I feel the weirdness start to go down around here I go out and recruit for weird,” he says.

Think about broadening the range of perspectives in your innovation program by including academics, consultants and people from accrediting agencies. Create an innovation ecosystem.

2. Customer Centered

A culture of innovation requires a deep commitment to understanding customers’ expectations and providing them with value. Our study revealed that a company’s customers can actually take the lead in helping it make significant innovation breakthroughs.

Look into how your customers might be practicing what’s being called “user innovation” — using your products for unintended purposes or refining them to meet their particular needs, without your company’s involvement and maybe even without its knowledge. Check out the possibilities for partnering with these customers to further develop the products.

IBM, which has been awarded more patents than any other company for each of the last 18 years, actively partners with its customers to create innovations. The company has opened Innovation Centers in 32 countries over the last few years.

The T-shirt manufacturing company Threadless generates its designs through its online customer community. Members vote on which designs should be produced and the designers get part of the sales proceeds. “Wisdom of crowds” initiatives have helped a wide range of businesses design what people want and predict their marketability. You also can use an open innovation network to encourage customers to propose technology development partnerships with you.

Look up, down and around your customer base for help with innovation. The next big idea might come from a totally unexpected source.

3. Context Rich

Information is essential for innovation. Our study showed that businesses that use innovation as a competitive advantage put lots of effort into developing formal and informal systems for collecting information and free-flowing it throughout the workforce. Their knowledge management systems include advanced forms of application sharing, document sharing, collaborative workplace design and wiki group editing.

Social networking has become the hot issue in knowledge management. It’s helping businesses know what they know — and let everyone else know it, too. This lets them get a bigger payoff from research spending because they no longer have to constantly reinvent the wheel. Medtronic uses a range of social media to help its 5,000 engineers and scientists in R&D identify people at the company who already are dealing with a particular challenge and ask those people questions.

MIT’s Michael Schrage proposes that businesses can improve knowledge management by using the software that helps academics spot plagiarized content in their students’ papers. The purpose here isn’t to discourage the lifting of co-workers’ ideas, though. Rather, the technology would identify the idea-copiers so they can be rewarded — and the employees whose ideas get copied most also would earn kudos.

4. Curious

Innovative leaders encourage their employees to question authority, to question their assumptions, to ask why, why not and what if? These leaders also question their own assumptions to be sure they’re open to others’ opinions. They make it clear to everyone that the company values experimentation. One way in which they demonstrate this is giving employees opportunities to pursue their ideas on company time and with company resources.

Google allows employees to devote 10 percent of their time to projects of their choice, a policy that has produced Gmail, Google News, Google Translate, Google Sky and other advancements. 3M Companies has been encouraging “experimental doodling” for years and has been rewarded with innovations like Post-It notes. Jeff Bezos of Amazon says, “I encourage our employees to go down blind alleys and experiment.”

Innovative companies also create physical environments that encourage generating ideas and sharing them. Pixar Animation Studio Inc. includes cafes and social areas in its buildings so a wide range of employees can wander in and create informal networks. Edward Ho, the technology lead for Google Buzz, seats employees “unnaturally close together” to foster idea-sharing.

5. Confidence Building

Our research shows that businesses that excel at innovation actively increase their employees’ capabilities and self-esteem. They continually improve employees’ skills with training that combines live instruction and on-line learning, with employer-paid college courses, job rotation, mentoring programs and stretch assignments.

Their learning initiatives cover both technology and the management skills needed for selecting promising job candidates, onboarding them, assessing their performance, motivating them to be more productive and dealing constructively with performance shortcomings.

These companies are cautious about wasting resources on ideas that won’t pan out but also are careful not to inhibit creative thinking by asking premature questions about feasibility and cost. They make it clear that failure is a necessary part of making progress and that a failed project won’t result in a scolding.

6. Challenging

Most business leaders focus on making their companies function efficiently. Innovative leaders focus on meeting challenges. A six-year study by faculty at Harvard Business School and Brigham Young University concluded that a key characteristic of these leaders is their willingness to challenge the status quo.

Our research confirmed this. Leaders of innovative companies constantly challenge the entire workforce to reach for new heights. They set ambitious (though achievable) goals, both short- and long-term, within a particular unit and company-wide. Employees who meet their goals are commended publicly, sometimes by senior executives. Even small wins are celebrated.

These leaders recognize that they have to make innovation a personal priority and their managers must do the same because otherwise the employees won’t support it. They also understand that a focus on innovation demands that there be internal changes — new structures and systems throughout the business, new functions, new roles and new success metrics.

They know there will be resistance to this effort, both overt and below the radar. They deal with it constructively by letting everyone understand that innovation will help the company prosper and this in turn will deliver payoffs to everyone. A leader has to express personal passion for the changes innovation requires or it won’t take hold.

How’s Your Innovation?

Ongoing innovation happens only when there’s a living, breathing innovation culture. Leaders who create and nurture this culture will be rewarded with both game-changing breakthroughs and ongoing smaller-scale improvements that cumulatively bring big gains. This culture can be built with the help of the Six C’s model.

Sharon Daniels is chief executive of AchieveGlobal, www.achieveglobal.com, which helps organizations translate strategy into business results by developing the skills and performance of their people. Its research-based solutions focus on leadership training, sales training and customer service training.

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• Copyright © 2012 Chief Executive Group, LLC. All rights reserved

From a Special Forces Perspective:

The Four Elements of Leadership

May 16 2011 - Gregory Hartley

The mechanics of team leadership involves four elements: understand your role, keep the team unified, do not fall victim to deference, and deal with differences.

Understand your role

“Lead” is a synonym for “direct.” In contrast, “manage” is synonymous with “control.” Richard Cartwright, a retired Special Forces soldier and one of my mentors in SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) school, used to rail about the Army creating managers, not leaders. The result: people got good at either ordering, “Do what I tell you to do” or automatically responding to orders. That is not the Special Forces way.

Leadership requires the ability to build a team that can shine. Your glory comes from their success. The leader’s role is to facilitate what people on his team do well, to remove obstacles blocking members of the team from performing effectively.

A financial executive who becomes the chief executive does not abandon her original expertise, but she does abandon the role and embrace the role of mentor. If she doesn’t, she will smother her own baby.

If an executive moves too far in the opposite direction, the result will be just as deadly. The person who clears obstacles for his team and obstinately protects them “no matter what” will lose sight of their shortcomings and lose sight of the mission.

Mission first and people always. If you fail in the mission, your people will be destroyed.

Keep the team unified

Once you have the team bonded, stay alert for any sign of division. When you notice it, use the tools you have relied on throughout your rise to the top to strengthen interpersonal bonds. If that means orchestrating situations in which your people bond against you, then do it–but do it in a way that makes the condition temporary. It’s an effective technique, but it is potentially dangerous.

Do not fall victim to deference

Deference is a double-edged sword. If you get too accustomed to having people defer to you, you stop growing as a leader. It will strain, if not destroy, your credibility.

Sometimes you have to admit that you don’t have all the answers. Scrupulous reliance on other experts is another way to bond your team as you establish yourself as a self-aware leader.

Deal with differences

Those of us teaching at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (SWIC), which houses the SERE school, were part of the last training challenges that candidates faced before earning their full status in Special Forces. One of those tests is called Robin Sage. The aim of it is to immerse them in a multi-day exercise in which they operate with native people as they would on a real mission.

Trainers create an artificial culture for it. When I participated, the training team was composed of Arabic speakers so we simply used our Arabic throughout the exercise. The SF candidates didn’t know Arabic so the language sill gave us a perfect opportunity to simulate a foreign culture.

The Special Forces people had duty to comply with the bogus societal and religious rituals we had concocted. They had to think through the convoluted stuff because a foreign culture will always have some aspects that seem ridiculous to outsiders. As soldiers in the Special Forces, they would have to exhibit cooperation and leadership with people who didn’t think how they thought or behave the way they behave.

Even if you have handpicked the people around you and everyone seems to speak the same language, nobody thinks exactly the same way you do. You may follow the same process and have the same physiological attributes, but you and the other guy are different. And some of what he does may seem ridiculous to you.

If you are going to deal with the differences, you need to be able to identify them. And then, you have to decide whether each is a source of strength for the organization, has a neutral effect, or is detrimental to the group and its operation.

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• Copyright © 2012 Chief Executive Group, LLC. All rights reserved

GW Smith Center Awarded LEED Gold Certification

GW’s Charles E. Smith Center recently joined the ranks of several other campus buildings—South Hall, Lafayette Hall and West Hall—that have received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification.

Upgrades to the building, which were completed in 2011, included a refurbished arena, renovated locker rooms and training and sports medicine facilities, an on-site academic center, and new box office, refreshment areas and the Colonials Club. The transformation was designed by architectural firm Gensler with construction management by Whiting-Turner Contracting Company.

“It takes a village to successfully complete a project the size and complexity of this transformation, and many thanks are due to the design and construction teams for leading us through this multiyear effort,” said Senior Associate Vice President for Operations Alicia Knight. “As a team, we really have created a dynamic new space for the GW community, and importantly, one that includes numerous sustainable features.”

The LEED Gold certification was achieved through incorporation of many sustainable features. These include optimizing energy performance through highly insulated exterior wall systems, energy-efficient windows and an Energy Star white roof. As a result, energy performance will exceed the standard for commercial buildings.

The building transformation also included use of low-flow plumbing fixtures and plant materials that are native or adaptive and require no permanent irrigation (reducing water usage by more than 40 percent over the baseline standard for commercial buildings).

In addition, more than 90 percent of waste was recycled or salvaged during demolition and construction, diverting it from landfills or incineration facilities. The transformation also included use of paints, adhesives, coatings, sealants and carpets that meet the Green Seal Standards or Green Label Plus requirements for low volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that reduce the quantity of indoor air contaminants.

The university’s commitment to sustainability in construction includes targeting a minimum LEED Silver for all new buildings. GW currently has several projects in development that are targeting LEED certification at the Gold level, including the law clinic townhouses, Ames Hall, the Science and Engineering Hall and the new School of Public Health and Health Services building. The Law Learning Center Garage, the GW Museum and the Conservation and Academic Incubation facility on the Virginia Science and Technology Campus are all targeting LEED Silver certification. In addition, upcoming renovations of the fifth and sixth floors of Ross Hall are targeted to achieve certification under the LEED Commercial Interiors program.

The Smith Center, a signature building located in the heart of GW’s Foggy Bottom Campus, is the home of GW athletics. It was named after the late Charles E. Smith, a nationally renowned real estate developer and GW honorary degree recipient and trustee who provided the initial leadership gift to build the facility in 1975. The center has hosted dignitaries such as President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, as well as GW’s Freshman Convocation, individual school Commencement celebrations and popular entertainers. Recently, the Smith Center hosted the Clinton Global Initiative University.

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