Senior Executive Excellence

I have had a passion for researching emerging leadership paradigms for years, looking for new ways to make employees more motivated, productive and innovative, and at the same time, organisations more profitable. These goals are in a causal relationship – the energy and mindsets of individual employees spread like a virus throughout organisations and have an impact on organisational success. With intensifying economic crisis, I have started to focus my research on leadership approaches in the downturn. One of the patterns that I have discovered is that whilst it is tempting for many companies to cut the budget for training and development in the downturn, the best companies never do that. Companies need to keep investing in the core competencies regardless of economic climate. Investing in training and development is a critical part of core competencies for many organisations. When organisations invest in development of their employees, they could expect more productivity and higher innovation levels, which can enable them to come out of this crisis strong and embrace faster growth when the economic cycle changes its trend. This time should be used to adopt new innovation practices and more positive mindset, learn new habits and skills and embrace fresh ideas and engaging experiments.

According to the latest research conducted at London Business School, majority of people spend less than 20 per cent of their working lives feeling energised, engaged, and innovative. To ensure long-term success, employees need to work with more energy, more enthusiasm, and most important of all, more innovation. This can be achieved by our new EMERGENT Leadership Programme which helps individuals and organisations to achieve extraordinary results regardless of the economic climate.

One of my current PhD students, Ms Tanmika Tamwatin has completed an experiment to investigate whether Mindfulness meditation can significantly increase emotional intelligence and leadership skills for senior executives. Eighty leaders participated in an experiment in Thailand. They were randomly allocated to the control and experimental groups (with 40 participants in each group), and their emotional intelligence and leadership skills were measured before and after experiments using EQ-I and Leadership Inventory instruments respectively. The experimental group was involved in regular weekly meditation practice during the period of three months.

The analysis of the data obtained revealed that, as expected, participants in the control group did not demonstrate any significant change in their emotional intelligence and leadership skills before and after experiments. However, the data obtained for the participants in the experimental group revealed, at 95% confidence interval, statistically significant increase in both emotional intelligence and leadership skills. The mean average for increase in emotional intelligence in experimental group was 15.375 %, whilst the mean average for increase in scores for leadership skills was 10.38 %.

A recent article published in Harvard Business Review by Daniel Goleman (a highly influential scholar in the area of Emotional Intelligence) and Richard Boyatzis argues that leaders can improve group performance by understanding the biology of empathy. They define Social intelligence as a set of interpersonal competencies, built on specific neural circuits that inspire people to be effective. They describe how the brain’s mirror neurons enable a person to reproduce the emotions he/she detects in others. This results in an instant sense of shared experience, and this phenomenon is well documented in the Organizational studies literature. Such a shared experience based on empathy can help leaders to strengthen interpersonal skills and ultimately retain the key talent. According to Goleman and Boyatzis, other social neurons include spindle cells (allowing leaders to quickly choose the best way to respond to someone), and oscillators (used to synchronize people’s physical movements). They believe that great leaders are those whose behaviors powerfully leverage this complex system of brain interconnectedness. A specific advice offered to leaders is to strengthen their social circuitry and work hard at altering their behavior.

The authors provide an example of an executive who became socially smarter by embracing a change program that comprised a 360-degree evaluation, intensive coaching and long-term collaboration with a mentor. These actions have resulted in stronger relationships with colleagues, better performance and a promotion.

Two phases of my EXCELLENCE model use various leading edge techniques for increasing emotional and social intelligence, from Psychological Kinesiology and Sedona Method to Emotional Freedom Techniques and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which can be combined to achieve powerful changes in social intelligence (interpersonal excellence) and group performance. 

I recently came across the book “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else” by Geoff Colvin (published by Portfolio Books, a member of the Penguin Group). I have found in this book additional research evidence that has confirmed my beliefs and practice used in my coaching and training. In summary, achieving excellence in personal and professional performance is not predisposed by our genes, i.e. natural talents that we may be born with. Research findings confirm that if the top achievers have a particular talent, it may be irrelevant. What seems to be most relevant for achieving excellence and top performance relates to deliberate, continuously repeated practice designed specifically to improve performance, getting continuous (constructive) feedback on performance, regular setting of immediate goals to be achieved, using self-observation and self-evaluation. Finally, the most important action anyone striving for excellence can take is to look within themselves to understand what they really want and understand their core beliefs. Do they believe that if they do the work with immense effort and focus over longer period of time, they will eventually achieve the highest levels of achievements?

At Senior Executive Excellence, we use a variety of leading edge techniques for belief change that can make a significant difference in personal and professional performance and help individuals and teams to reach highest levels of performance.

I have been researching emerging leadership paradigms for years, and it is apparent that traditional, mechanistic, command-and-control based leadership approaches cannot work in interconnected, complex and global business environments. I have found a lot of evidence for this in extensive literature research and practical examples (two practical examples were included in our AOM presentation in Anaheim this summer). I recently read an article reporting on a survey on the future of leadership conducted by the Centre for Creative Leadership (Colorado, USA). The survey included more that 350 managers and 85% of them believe that the definition of leadership has changed in the last five years, and majority of survey participants agree that leaders face challenges beyond their individual capabilities.

Shared and team-based leadership are emerging as one of the more popular forms of leadership, especially in the context of knowledge workers. This is echoed by Professor Jay Light, the current Dean of Harvard Business School (HBS), who in his speech given at HBS centennial summit, said that what we most urgently need now (when faced with global financial crisis) is leadership. In a reply to his question “Who will lead?”, his answer was that HBS graduates will, but they will have to ensure that future leaders are team players and not heroic soloist.