 Leadership Coaching for Speed:
A Counterintuitive Approach
by Frank Wagner, Ph.D. and Leland A. Russell
This mini-case study describes a counterintuitive approach to coaching a Fortune 500 leadership team to increase the speed of their strategic thinking, decision-making and implementation.
The Leadership Challenge: A Faster Paced Environment
Under the leadership of Chris Van Ingen, the Agilent Technologies Bio-Analytical Measurement business doubled in size during a five year period to become a $2 billion business with an excellent Return on Invested Capital. Van Ingen built an outstanding leadership team and laid a solid foundation for future profitable growth in Agilent's current as well as emerging markets.
In growing the business, Van Ingen faced a challenge that many leaders face today: the environment had changed. It was moving at a much faster pace than it had been in the past.
To address this challenge, Van Ingen decided that he and his leadership team would implement three well-known leadership development best practices:
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Get 360 feedback on their leadership behaviors
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Pick one leadership behavior to focus on improving
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Receive personal coaching on their targeted behavior for one year
One of the behaviors on Agilent’s 360 feedback survey was “Modeling Speed.” Van Ingen had received the HIGHEST score of anyone in his business on “Modeling Speed.”
The Leadership Coach’s Rationale
Van Ingen chose GEO Group Managing Director, Frank Wagner Ph.D., as his external coach. His decision was largely based upon an interview in which Wagner suggested a counterintuitive approach to selecting the leadership behavior to focus on improving over the coming year: work on getting even better at Modeling Speed.
Wagner's rationale was that, not only would Van Ingen improve his own performance, his entire leadership team would become very conscious of their own behavior with regard to Modeling Speed through the monthly process of giving Van Ingen personal feedback on how he could improve.
After six months, Van Ingen and his leadership team received an interim report on their selected behavior. Although he had previously score very high on Modeling Speed, Van Ingen had, in fact, improved significantly over the past six months.
The Benefits of Speed
Van Ingen obviously understood the benefits of speed. In a fast-paced environment, to win you must move quickly because time is NOT on your side — the slower you move the less chance you will have of achieving your objectives.
One reason speed is important is Murphy's Law, which states that "anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This means that the longer you take to get something done the greater the probability that something will go wrong.
Another reason for speed is the ever-changing environment. No matter how theoretically perfect your original plan may be, as the execution timeline lengthens, its value depreciates because the context in which you are operating changes. Your original assumptions may be completely obsolete. Indeed, you may have the perfect plan for a world that no longer exists.
How fast should you move? The answer is simple: move at the speed you need to succeed. With few exceptions, this means moving faster than the rate of change in your environment and faster than your competitors.
The Team takes on Speed
“Modeling Speed” was among the LOWEST scoring behaviors among Van Ingen’s leadership team in the initial 360 feedback. This was not surprising because most of Van Ingen’s leadership team had come from the traditional measurement business and they were not used to the high-velocity of the bio-analytical marketplace.
However, no one, other than Van Ingen, had chosen to work on improving their Modeling Speed behavior. Given this, Van Ingen decided that the entire leadership team should add “Modeling Speed” as a leadership behavior to improve during the second half of the coaching year.
At the end of the year, the entire leadership team had indeed improved. They were operating at a faster pace in three critical areas: strategic thinking, decision-making and implementation. There were two reasons for this success.
First, as Wagner had predicted, the leadership team had become very conscious of their own behavior with regard to Modeling Speed through the monthly process of giving Van Ingen personal feedback on how he could improve.
Second, Van Ingen had been “walking the talk” ─ demonstrating the leadership behavior he expected in his team. Incidentally, the importance of this is backed by 25 years of original research and data from over 3 million leaders by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner, authors of the classic, “The Leadership Challenge®”. Kouzes and Posner sum it up perfectly. If the leader has not internalized the desired leadership behavior himself or herself, he or she cannot expect exemplary "followership" from others.
A Fundamental Truth
There is a fundamental truth about leadership in a world that is operating on Internet Time: laggards lose. Organizations need speed, and the speed of leadership determines the speed of the organization. The world's most successful companies have leadership that moves quickly to spot new opportunities, mobilize resources and bring new products and services to market in a flash.
How can you develop leaders who move quickly? The counterintuitive approach we have described ─ getting an entire leadership team focused on Modeling Speed through personal coaching and monthly feedback sessions for 12 months ─ is a way that works.
"Move Quickly" is one of the three critical mindsets of the Leadership In FastTime® approach to Execution Excellence.
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