Accelerating Performance

How Organizations can mobilize, execute and transform with agility

This new book by Colin Price and Sharon Toye, partners at Heidrick & Struggles, provides actionable tips for CEOs and senior executives on how to boost the metabolic rate of their teams. The following is adapted from the book Accelerating Performance by Colin Price and Sharon Toye.

Core Mind-Sets

You can’t know what the future will hold. However, building the discipline of adopting and maintaining accelerating mind-sets enables leaders to meet full on and with dexterity the ever-changing contexts and requirements within which they galvanize and lead those who follow them. Think of yourself as sitting in a swivel chair—you can swivel between multiple different systems to make sense of things rather than having straight through, simple processing. At the core is your ability to be agile as change erupts all around you.

Research by Paul Brown and Brenda Hales concluded that there is a need to create “the conditions under which [people] can use all their own adaptive capacity to get to the goals they are after.” We found that the ability to learn in this way was twice as likely to be present in leaders of accelerating companies than in those of derailing ones. We set out to answer the following question: What are the few compelling shifts in mind-sets that enable leaders to be agile in this way and, in turn, to set the pace in today’s ever-changing landscape? Our answer can be found in the table below.

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The first four mind-sets are so important that we cover them in great detail in Chapter 14 (“Ripple Intelligence”), Chapter 15 (“Resource Fluidity”), Chapter 16 (“Dissolving Paradox”), and Chapter 17 (“Liquid Leadership”). Here we explore the other four mind-sets to help both you and others around you accelerate.

I Need to Know versus Doubt Is Powerful

Leaders do well when they exercise the power of doubt. Our conversations with and studies of CEOs found that senior leaders must routinely make tough decisions, yet many CEOs worry that they don’t have the right information—or enough of it.

Our interviews with more than 150 global CEOs suggest that the key to this dilemma is to embrace uncertainty and doubt by focusing on the feeling side of decision making and not just the thinking side.

The Persians used to make decisions twice: once while sober and once while drunk. If the decisions agreed, they proceeded. If not, they deferred a decision. We’re not recommending drinking at the office, but the Persians certainly had a good run, ruling the known world for some 300 years, by combining their thinking and feeling sides. CEOs who combine the two dimensions can get more comfortable with discomfort, better distinguish constructive doubt from disruptive second guessing, and better select the appropriate decision-making strategies that help minimize risk and maximize opportunity.

It’s Okay to Be Grumpy versus I’m on 24/7, and What I Do Impacts Every Second

Daniel Goleman and his colleagues found that the leader’s mood and its attendant behaviors are both the most important and the most surprising to leaders themselves. They write: “The leader’s mood and behaviors drive the moods and behaviors of everyone else. A cranky and ruthless boss creates a toxic organization filled with negative underachievers who ignore opportunities; an inspirational, inclusive leader spawns acolytes for whom any challenge is surmountable.”

Add the findings of the Gallup Business Journal— that 25 percent of employees would fire their bosses if they could, and that 75 percent report that the single most stressful aspect of their job is their immediate line manager—and we see how potent leadership mood is. The economy runs on people, and leaders set the pace in organizations. Pause for a moment and think through those grumpy leaders who you’ve come across in your career and the impact they’ve had on those they lead and the ability of the organization to operate at pace. Now think about those moments when you, too, have been guilty of the same, knowing it but not having the discipline to catch yourself and course-correct.

For good or bad, leadership is contagious. A core skill in any leader’s tool kit is to be able to change his or her internal state to ensure that the contagion he or she is spreading is positive.

Author Gary Hamel summed up the warning message that Pope Francis sent to potential grumpy leaders within the Roman Curia: “Leaders are susceptible to an array of debilitating maladies, including arrogance, intolerance, myopia, and pettiness. When those diseases go untreated, the organization itself is enfeebled. To have a healthy church, we need healthy leaders.”

For good or bad, leadership is contagious. A core skill in any leader’s tool kit is to be able to change his or her internal state to ensure that the contagion he or she is spreading is positive. There are no two ways about it: How you work, your imprint, and your shadow of leadership make the difference. As our colleagues at Senn Delaney say: When you go into the office, decide what floor of the mood elevator you want to get off on and be here now. At best, the shadow of the leaders in your organization can be a competitive advantage; at worst, it can be a significant drag. Jeff Sprecher, founder and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, tells us, “I’m a terrible manager. I am just a terrible manager. And so you say, ‘Okay, how does a terrible manager manage an organization?’ The only thing I could come up with is to lead by example, to run my own behavior the way I would want my employees to run their behavior, and do it in a way that is quite obvious and transparent and hope that people will try to emulate the leader.”

I Don’t Have Enough Time to Be a Good Leader versus Creating Leadership Is My Goal

Think of leadership as fire, not water. It’s not a limited resource such as water but a spreading process such as fire.

Not all leadership needs to come from the top. Many articles and books talk about how organizations are prone to getting stuck in the middle of the hierarchy. Midlevel leaders are variously named “permafrost,” “the marzipan or clay layer,” or “the missing middle.” These are all ways to describe the difficulty of engaging middle managers and creating leadership throughout the organization. How important is this middle layer?

Think of leadership as fire, not water. It’s not a limited resource such as water but a spreading process such as fire.

For four years, a team of researchers at Stanford studied the performance of more than 20,000 frontline workers, such as airline check-in staff, call center workers, and supermarket checkout personnel. An analysis of six million data points showed that productivity was increased by 12 percent if someone who had a poor manager was given a strong one. The recent development of organizational ecosystems brings another twist because of all the contractors and freelancers who have to be led. Apple, for example, has 45,000 employees worldwide but another 180,000 people outside the company who earn their living developing apps for Apple’s iOS. A whole different kind of leadership is required now.

According to neuroscience, the degree to which a leader engages others is the degree to which the leader inspires trust and excitement. It is feelings, not thoughts, that dominate how we make decisions. It is this energy from feelings that can inspire accelerated performance. We see lots of organizations striving to engage their people by trying to tap into their emotions through value statements, even though most people’s organizational life is not the espoused values or mission and vision statements. The objectives, tasks, KPIs, and outputs required of them are the things we measure and, therefore, the things we pay attention to. But these things don’t motivate people to apply their discretionary effort. Only things that shape and elicit people’s feelings can do that, and only leaders are capable of creating those things. The creation of a motivational culture is not an outcome of accident or coincidence. How you make decisions, how you have conversations, how you direct the actions of those you lead, and how you behave generate a chain reaction in those you lead.

Look no further than Howard Schultz of Starbucks to see the value of leadership. The company thrived during his first 15 years at the helm, lost its way when he stepped away from the CEO position for 8 years, and has gone gangbusters again since he returned in early 2008, so much so that it made our list of super accelerators. Scott Pitasky, executive vice president and chief partner resources officer, told us that there is an emotional component to the business: “It’s about the relationships that we have with our partners [what Starbucks calls its employees], and their relationship with customers. That creates a unique environment that is the core of our business. You can’t have a great relationship with your customers if you don’t have a great relationship with your partners. It won’t work. It’s a strategy that binds us, and an emotional commitment.

A couple years ago we had an investor day here in Seattle with a group of investment bankers, and Howard started out saying, ‘I want to talk about love.’ That felt a little awkward as a way to begin a discussion about how we are doing as a company, but that’s a pretty good way to describe what we do. And I haven’t seen that in other places I’ve worked.” Business leaders need to learn, as politicians have, that even if you govern in prose, you must still campaign in poetry.

I Know Myself Well versus Feedback Is a Gift

Accurately gauging how we impact others can be very difficult indeed. We will never forget working with one leader who was certain of his ability to be empowering. When asked how he knew his people were empowered, he replied (with no trace of irony), “Because I told them to be.”

Leaders need to find time & ways to reflect on their behaviors & their impact on others, identify what drivers shape their behaviors, & determine how, with discipline, to adjust their behaviors.

Leaders need to find time and ways to reflect on their behaviors and their impact on others, identify what drivers shape their behaviors, and determine how, with discipline, to adjust their behaviors. Feedback is critical. Goleman and his colleagues found that an alarming number of leaders suffer from “neartotal ignorance” about how they are perceived within the organization.

“It’s not that leaders don’t care how they are perceived; most do. But they incorrectly assume that they can decipher this information themselves. . . . They’re wrong.” There is a further stage to be conquered. Something must be done with the feedback. But we humans inherently resist change. We can talk a good talk, but actually making a significant change generates fear in the best of us, and we find incredibly inventive ways to avoid change. We have to own up to needing to do things differently, which can bring feelings of shame, guilt, and incompetence. And any behavior change can be clunky, feel strange, and backfire on us as we try to develop new ways of acting.

It’s easy to revert to old patterns when we don’t get the change right the first time. Change requires grit and determination. Change requires curiosity about one’s own resistance to change, coupled with an understanding of the processes going on in our brain. Realizing this can release us from fear.

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