Leadership - Presentation skills

The three Essential Elements of a Great Presentation

By Zhuang Le & He Yuan Marco Polo Consulting

Delivering a great presentation is a crucial professional skill for leaders. A killing presentation can inspire audience and make them more likely to embrace ideas or opinions of the speaker. However we may be confused on how to make a compelling talk.

Are you tired of listening to some tedious presentations made by others? Are you sure that your speeches are attractive to your audience?

Gail Zack Anderson in this article gives advice on delivering a terrific speech and organizing the structure of a talk: the three essential elements are the speech opening, body and closing. Read more on Management help blog

CV tricks

What you can put on your CV when your experience is still short or you are in career transition

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

When just graduated you may find challenging writing a meaningful CV, the same when you plan to change career path and you have not matured important experiences in the new field yet. How to do? In these cases the extracurricula experiences are the key and the way you explain and link them to your future career journey. read more on "thedailymuse"

Leadership

 

Situational leadership

 

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

 

Our leadrship style cannot be the same with team members (followers) with different maturity/competence and engagement/committment . Let's see how using the approach of Situational Leadership

 

 

 

 

 

Manager vs leader

Leader= Manager with leadership

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

Often Manager and Leaders are compared as two opposite concepts (as in the picture below) and somehow the "manager" is considered the negative part. Actually for me the 2 are not in opposition, just leader is something more than manager. Leader is a manager -who manage the current situation in a positive way (planning, organizing, evaluating results, not blaming, dictating etc) - but also lead to the future, engaging, inspiring towards the change.

 

                                                   NO                                             YES

 

 

 

 

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Building higly effective team: be candid

The importance of being "Candid"

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting


In a previous post we spoke about the 5 dysfunctions of a team and we saw how the fear of conflict is one of them. Team meetings become boring and unproductive when people do not speak honestly and openly. Being candid and giving onest feedback is highly important if we want to make real discussions and decisions. In this article by HBR Keith Ferrazzi explains how candor, criticism and teamwork are strongly interrelated.read more on HBR

Motivation quote

"Appreciation is thanking, recognition is seeing, and encouragement is bringing hope for the future" by Martin Webster 

Leadership competencies: emotional intelligence (Being humble)

“It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am.”

By ZhuangLe & HeYuan Marco Polo Consulting

It was generally believed that people are supposed to be prideful and competitive to be good leaders,nevertheless,we often ignore that humanity virtue and being humble is a crucial factor in managing, besides professional skills. We all experience hardships. Some people can bounce back easily and learn from losses,  but the others don't. What is the difference between these two kinds of people? John C. Maxwell believes that  not pride but humility is what that allows us to learn from mistakes. See how did he learn from a T-shirt gift with the sentence "It’s hard to be humble when you’re as great as I am." on it.

John C. Maxwell is an internationally respected leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold more than 18 million books. Dr. Maxwell is the founder of EQUIP, a non-profit organization that has trained more than 5 million leaders in 126 countries worldwide. A New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best-selling author, Maxwell has written three books that have sold more than a million copies. Read more on success.com

Leadership competencies: emotional intelligence

The importance of emotional intelligence: for the leader and the company performance

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting


Interesting article by Harvard Business Review about the impact of Leaders' mood on staff members. Easy to say difficult to learn how to manage emotions.

What most influences your company’s bottom-line performance? The answer will surprise you—and make perfect sense: It’s a leader’s own mood.

Executives’ emotional intelligence—their self-awareness, empathy, rapport with others—has clear links to their own performance. But new research shows that a leader’s emotional style also drives everyone else’s moods and behaviors—through a neurological process called mood contagion. It’s akin to “Smile and the whole world smiles with you.”

Read more on HBR

Capability building

Why companies in China need support for capability building

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

From the "attached" article by Mc Kinsey Insight I extrapolated some key points (in black) about the challanges that multinational companies face in building capability in China. It is exactly what our clients face when they ask us for support (in blue)

Challenges:

1) Perennial challenge for multinationals: the Chinese context and culture, which may require local tailoring of global approaches. Often an effective balance between centralization and decentralization is difficult to find and companies need an help to set up a proper discussion on the topic between global HQ and local subsidiaries

2) Chinese companies generally lack a systematic approach to nurturing employees moving up the organizational ladder. They misconstrue capability building as a classroom activity, missing the impact of linking it to actual business. And they are too inflexible either to fire underperformers or to reward and promote employees, including managers, who change their behavior and adopt the necessary mind-sets. Succession planning, talent development and performance management are processes that still need to be improved in many companies in China, for this reason we are asked to support companies to set up these new processes or to improve the current ones.

3) In many Chinese companies today, capability building remains synonymous with classroom training, partially thanks to the tradition of rote learning in schools When we audit the training system of companies in China very often we have to recommend and help them to develop integrated learning systems where the traditional classroom training is integrated with experience learning, coaching, e-learning, individual development plans, communities of sharing and gaming approaches to learning

4) Historically, many human-resource departments emphasized quantity over quality, placing priorities such as cross-functional collaboration and leadership skills on the back burner. Even today, many HR functions do no more than oversee salaries and benefits, relying largely on one-to-one training in local plants. The HR competence in China is quite young, HR teams, expecially in medium companies, need support to build their capabilities and learn a more sofisticated HR Business partnership approach. Co-design and co-implementation with external HR senior experts who coach them is often the best solutions,  these programs can last from a 6 months to 2 years of part-time on-site or off-site support.

5) Most of its leaders had transferred from technical positions into general-management ones, without sufficient training or coaching on how to manage that transition Coaching programs are very effective solutions to prepare individual contributors to become managers of others and build a broader skill-set

Here some practices companies have started:

1) The venture has now set up a “corporate university” to encourage cross-functional collaboration among a range of functions—notably, engineering, finance, manufacturing, purchasing, quality, and sales—as well as better communication with global headquarters to ensure a successful launch Cross-functional collaboration is a very big challange in China, we work with teams (expecially executive teams) to enhance the trust among team members, to improve the ability to manage conflict, and to set team objectives that canalize the energies of the team on a common target instead of individual targets, this is a true silos buster.

2) Developing Chinese teaching materials to help solve problems, building day-to-day business problems around products that participants would find in the Chinese market, and localizing global training materials through culturally appropriate metaphors and examples. Cross-cultural knowledge is key for every practice in China, the biggest mistake is to assume that what works in our culture works and make sense also in another. Cross-cultural programs can help to increase cross-cultural awarness

Read more on mckinsey insight

Exapts or local managers in emerging countries? see the third option

Beyond expats: Better managers for emerging markets

By Giorgia Madonno Marco Polo Consulting

The CEO of Manpower, in an interview published by Mckinsey Quaterly, proposes "revers expatriation" approach - rotate local managers through some of the company’s more mature operations instead of sending expat to emerging markets.

For sure the localization of leaders is a trend and the proposed approach can help to develop leadership skills and build bridges across the company locations.

However, based on my consultancy experience on this topic, this has to be done wisely and with a medium-term perspective:

1) recognizing the gaps that local leaders still have (for some key and complex positions balancing with foreigners' expertise and managerial approach is still needed)
2) having very well structured programs for "reverse expatriation", involving both the host and the sending organization in preparing it
3) ensure a strong "buy in" of the host organization. Too often local managers sent to mature market operations are "abandoned" and no-one take charge of their learning path
4) consider to assign a organizational position to the "revers exapt" while abroad in order to challange him/her with responsibilities that can faster the learning pace
5) providing cross cultural coaching and support before, during and after the expereince, in order to capitalize it

And for foreign expats, which is the professional perspective? The number of opportunities for foreigners in emerging markets is decreasing and we assist more and more to a localization of contracts for foreigners (Local contract + benefits).

In the medium term the point is to see if signals for a tird approach, that usually follow the localization trend, will emerge: globalization for diversity improvement.
The sequence is often the following:
1) Expatriation from Corporate for internalization of the company
2) Localization for the adaptation to the market
3) Globalization for diversity improvement and global competition

When companies succed to localize the management they start to feel a need of diversification of leaders in order to better compete in a globalized market and they may start to rotate people across markets to build diverse management teams. So in the future it may happen to have a bright Chinese leader sent to Europe, a Brasilian talent to China, an European to US and so on.
Let's wait to see.

Read more on mckinsey quaterly

Are you a leader or a manager?

Leadership and management - Differences

By Giorgia Madonno - Marco Polo Consulting

It is a classic definition, but still it helps....

Management	Leadership
MANAGE THE STATUS QUO	TRANSFORM
Is viewed as implementation of the leader's vision and changes introduced by leaders, and the maintenance and administration of organizational infrastructure	Is viewed as involving the articulation of an organizational vision and the introduction of major organizational change; provides inspiration and deals with highly stressful and troublesome aspects of the external environments of organizations
Focuses on the tasks (things) when performing the management functions of planning, organization and controlling	Focuses on the interpersonal (people) leadership management function
Planning. Establishes detailed objectives and plan for achieving them	Establishes directions; develop a vision and the strategies needed for its achievement
Organizing and staffing. Sets up structure for employees as they do the job the way the manager wants it done	Innovate and allows employees to do the job any way they want, so long as they get results that relate to the vision
Controlling. Monitors results against plans and takes corrective actions	Motivates and inspires employees to accomplish the vision in creative ways
Predictable. Plans, organizes, and controls with consistent behaviors. Prefers stability	Makes innovative, quick changes that are not very predictable. Prefers change.
Managers do things right	Leaders do the right things
The focus is on stability, control, competition, work, and uniformity	The focus on change, empowerment, collaboration, people, and diversity
The focus is on short-term view, avoiding risks, maintaining and imitating	The focus is on long-term view, taking risks, innovating and originating

Source: Leadership - Theory, application, Skill development -Lussier & Achua