Decide what kind of leader to be and collect followers.
At an as yet unspecified time in the near future, the revered leader of a high-functioning team must exit, due to age, health, opportunity, or some other compelling reason.
The way the team sees it, the exiting leader must bring in a new leader or anoint someone from within, though no team member is clearly the one to take the reins in the eyes of the others. The team is anxious and wants to know what steps will be taken when to secure a new leader. Continue reading Leader Exit
Do you wonder what is the easiest, least expensive, and most flexible approach an owner/founder/operator can use to attract and motivate top talent? This post introduces Mark C Bronfman’s article on using Profits Interests vs Options to install simple, flexible, and highly effective executive incentive plans.
Founders who still own and run their businesses may bring on executives to get to the next level and/or to free themselves from being a slave to their success. The challenge is how to provide incoming executives with attractive upside at low cost, risk, and complexity to the owner, founder.
Profits Interests, an ownership and incentive planning solution under current US tax law, are often the right and best approach. This powerful equity incentive plan requires no buy-in; is not taxable at grant or vesting; and, its capital liquidations are taxed as capital gains
In his article: The Profits Interest, now available as an IntelliVen Insight, Mark C. Bronfman, Founder of Bold Value and affiliated with Sagemark Consulting, describes how Profits Interest can convey a true ownership interest without the friction of paying for the capital of the past. Continue reading Profits Interest vs Options
If you’ve been in charge for a while and it feels like performance and growth are not where you want them to be, you probably know that you are likely headed in the wrong direction.
Every leader, team, and organization eventually hits an inflection point. There IS a solution.
The first step is to take stock of how things are going, why things need to change, and how they would be if things were going well.
A management offsite is an excellent way to engage the top team along these lines. However, to prepare for and facilitate a high-powered executive offsite takes careful planning, data collection, analysis, and design effort.
Most leaders find it difficult to adequately prepare—assuming they even know how—for their offsite. Further, it is nearly impossible for a leader to facilitate and participate in, let alone also lead, their own offsite. A better strategy is to hire experts who use proven approaches, tools, and methods to prepare and facilitate.
Continue reading How to develop leaders, teams, and organizations that perform to their potential.
Co-operative leadership, or co-leadership, is when two or more leaders deploy their individual great strengths as a collective whole in pursuit of a common goal. Co-leadership can cause an organization to experience extraordinary results, in a short time, and at low cost.
This IntelliVen insight summarizes the core thesis of Alain Gauthier’s book which is that evolutionary co-leadership is needed now to catalyze the emergence of a truly generative and wholesome society.
A Wholesome Society, a society where everyone is invited, supported, and challenged to become a conscious, co-responsible co-creator – developing and expressing their unique gifts, while contributing to the evolution of humanity. |
 Click to open Gauthier’s article. |
True leadership involves crossing a threshold that opens to the unknown – becoming an example for others in discovering and giving voice to new possibilities to explore and realize.
Co-leadership opens a new space where an ensemble of people can jointly act as leaders and inspire others to do the same.
CEO transitions into organizations are not easy. How long CEOs last and the frequency with which their own, and their Board’s, expectations are met have been studied in academia and well reported in the media. The results are stunning.
Two out of five incoming CEOs fail to meet their objectives in the first 18 months. Even those who make it past 18 months now have an average tenure of 7.6 years, down from 9.5 in 1995. The outlook is even bleaker for outside CEO hires, who take twice as long to ramp up as those promoted from within. Only one in five CEOs hired from outside are considered high performers at the end of their first year by their boards and nearly half leave within 18 months (reference: Harvard Business Review, 2014).
CEO failure may have less to do with competence, knowledge, or experience than with how CEO transitions are orchestrated and whether key support steps are missed. While not a guarantee, a programmatic approach to new executive transition can increase the odds and shorten the time-frame in which success is likely to be achieved.
Four goals, detailed in a previous IntelliVen post, guide the approach. Though they are simple to understand, the goals are not easy to achieve. Expert third-party facilitation, an authorizing environment committed to success, and previous experience, diligence, and focus go a long way towards improving the odds. Continue reading A Blueprint for Entering CEOs
