ARTICLE | September 03, 2024
September 2024, Volume 1, Issue 6
Bake’s Takes: A KHA Strategic Consulting Recommended Reads by Jonny Baker, Strategic Consulting Partner.
Hot Take: Some people prefer playing video games. Others prefer staring at marked slices of trees and hallucinate vividly for hours on end.
As a leader you need exposure to varying perspectives, insights, and ideas.
This month’s Top 3:
How CEOs Build Confidence in Their Leadership, Hildebrand, Baumgarten, Madhavan
- This article refreshingly gets it right. It talks about how new CEOs have two years to establish trust and gain confidence. Year 3 is when things take off for better or worse.
- Six primary focus areas for the new CEO are discussed: Set a deliberate pace, pick your battles strategically, align your team, engage stakeholders at the right time, communicate clearly and succinctly, and better yourself.
- Favorite line (and shameless plug): “Most CEOs, new or experienced, benefit from having a coach or an adviser-somebody who can regularly hold up the mirror, help them grow, provide new perspectives, and push their thinking.”
Making Yourself Indispensable, Zenger, Folkman, Edinger
- This article homes in on making your strengths more impactful rather than spending significant effort trying to turn weaknesses into mediocre results. The authors focus on 16 critical strengths and urge us to really be good in 3-5 of them.
- The reality is many of us believe our individual leadership is most critical, but the research on Teams shows that complementary leaders working together bring significantly more impact. We will feature an article on teams next month that speaks about this.
- Favorite line: “Raising just one competency to the level of outstanding can up your overall leadership effectiveness ranking from the bottom third to almost the top third.”
Spotting Talent in the 21st Century, Fernandez-Araoz
- This article talks about the skills to look for when hiring and pathing employees for the betterment of the organization. It also gives practical ways to assess the below five critical items that make up potential.
- Potential, based on their research, can be broken down into motivation (and whether it is selfless or selfish), curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.
- Other leadership abilities worth assessing: intelligence, values, and leadership abilities defined as: strategic orientation, market insight, results orientation, customer impact, collaboration and influence, organizational development, team leadership, and change leadership.
“Pushing your high potentials up a straight ladder toward bigger jobs, budgets, and staffs will continue their growth, but it won’t accelerate it. Diverse, complex, challenging, uncomfortable roles will.”
Why Bake’s Takes: I have been accused by friends, colleagues, and clients of pelting people with articles and book recommendations. Some of my mentees have stacks of books they will never get through (some of my mentors too). As such, I have decided to curate a monthly summary that holds what I deem to be the 3 best articles or reads of the month (when I read them, not published that month). I do love Harvard Business Review and you will see much of it as my work is focused on equipping leaders for the tough tasks ahead of creating vision, alignment, and execution. I have yet to find a better resource for equipping that work well.
Learn more about our offering: https://kha.cpa/services/consulting/