Catharine Larkin - Inspiring Leadership Success

Jim

Welcome back to People Performance Radio, you are here with Jim Matheson …

Steve

… and Steve Hunt, a little slow on the uptake today Jim, sorry.

Steve

Yeah, I was a little dreary in my intro as well, but I've been stepping in for super producer Zak, so I'm trying to learn about all this equipment for you.

Steve

Cool, I just got back from HR technology so …

Jim

That's right. How was it?

Steve

It was good, but you're in that kind of post conference haze after non-stop massive schmoozing for two days, but fascinating, a lot of cool stuff going on, so it was good.

Jim

That's great. Did you meet any listeners while you were out there?

Steve

I did, I did meet some listeners, and got some nice positive feedback from people, which is good. I imagine listeners who hate the show probably don't hate it enough to walk up to me and tell me how bad it is!

Jim

Maybe they don't recognise you—you are just a voice. You don't have, I mean we try to throw your photo up here and there, but …

Steve

Oh, that's right, that is probably that's true, so when I talk to people suddenly they go, "Wait—that voice—it's familiar".

Jim

That could be. Well, for those people who weren't at HR Tech, if you want to give us some feedback, or if you have any questions you can email us at podcast@successfactors.com, or give us a call at 650-425-7474.

So Steve, I guess so it's onto today's interview, whoo did you get this time?

Steve

We had a great conversation with Catharine Larkin, who is the Senior Partner with MICA Consulting Partners, and she focuses on leadership development with a strong focus on the use of objectives and standardized assessments, and had some really interesting observations. This is a great podcast worth listening to for her theory of the "terrible thirty-threes", which are somewhat like the "terrible twos", only it applies to executive leadership, so some great insights into making sure leaders are successful, and why they derail and sort of understanding it, not just effective for being a leader, but also some really good advice for working with senior level leaders, so a cool chance to hear from somebody who has spent a lot of time having very intense conversations with very high level leaders, so it's a great interview.

Jim

Alright, we will jump to the interview right after these words.

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Steve

Hi, you are here with People Performance Radio. We are very glad to be talking today with Catharine Larkin, who is a Senior Partner with MICA Consulting Partners, and I guess we will just start out, Catharine, first thanks for being here on People Performance Radio, and can you tell us a little bit about what MICA Consulting Partners does and what you do?

Catherine

Thank you Steve. I'm really pleased to be here and happy to share what MICA does. Basically MICA Consulting is a North American leader in leadership, with more than 35 years' experience in the field. Generally our clients are the Fortune 500, and I guess what we have tended to focus on is the life cycle of leadership, looking to work with clients from every moment in time of the employees' existence within an organization, whether it be through how we select them, how we align them to the values and culture, to how we develop and then advance, which is of course the succession planning component we are talking about today, and I think one the unique features of MICA is that our work is actually grounded in assessment, so everything that we do starts with some baseline assessment of getting to that sort of core of an individual, and using that as the sort of ground up, if you will, of the other areas which is the aligning, developing and advancing.

A little bit about my role in MICA, is I am Senior Partner with MICA Consulting Partners, and I think I've focused most of my time basically at the CEO and executive team level. I have worked worldwide, basically have had the privilege of becoming the trusted advisor for many senior players, and I think if you asked me what I was best known for, it's basically transformational executive coaching, where I try to blend both the head, the heart and the practical levels. Basically I often laugh, I tell senior executives that I tell them they pay me to tell them what other people get fired if they told them, so I'm in a pretty good place, and I think I've got some pretty happy clients, and I'm pretty proud of the work that I've done.

Steve

That's cool, so a little bit more about MICA, so do you mainly work with, I guess two questions, one, do you mainly work with senior leadership, or do you work with people all the way down to the front line level, or do you mainly just focus on that top level?

Catherine

Well, I think basically what we are trying to do is we try to do enterprise-wide leadership, we try not to target just a specific level, because everything is so interconnected in terms of, from when you bring people on right through the system, so what we do have. obviously starting at the top of the house, is the most important and getting alignment at that level, but we have different approaches and different ways of being creative and integrative right through the organization, pretty much starting at first line supervisory level or first line management and then working through up to senior levels.

Steve

Okay, and then you mentioned you are very-assessment focused, I am a huge fan of assessments, and in fact I wrote a book, so I always have to get my own plugs in there every so often, but what type of assessments do you use?—when you say assessments, what exactly are these, like personality assessments, or are they 360 assessments—what are they?

Catherine

Let me just give you an overview. Obviously, there are always fundamental kinds of assessments that individual organizations do to help people understand themselves, so you always have the self-awareness component kinds of assessments, which are the personality, and then you get kind of the cognitive level in terms of one's ability to deal with increasingly complex issues, which becomes more important the more senior or the more complex your role becomes, and then there's different kinds of assessments, which are very deep in terms of leadership, predicting success of individuals in leadership roles, their current role and also predicting their success in terms of going forward.

There are a couple of things that I think that we're doing that are pretty interesting, one is we have resurrected certainly, in our market, the assessment center technology, which is proving to have taken off like crazy, because organizations can't afford to make mistakes, particularly moving people into senior roles, so what we're doing is working with them to say, what are a series of simulated activities people would have to go through in order to be effective at the next level, or two levels up, and then we put them through that kind of series and have them observed by our psychologist or trained practitioners, and then do reports on them, and that's a very big part of our assessment, because I anybody in that business knows it's the single most predictive, other than put them in basically a try out scrimmage, that you could with hockey or something.

The second innovative thing that we are trying to do is, we have a component of our business called MICA Online, and we recognize there's a huge desire for people to be self-sufficient, so we're working with some of our clients to give them access to a MICA Online website, if you will, and we help them figure out what kinds of things they need and want to measure, and we group different kinds of diagnostics together, teach them how to use the system, and so at any moment in time an executive or a first line manager can either go through a diagnostic battery themselves to get self-awareness and get advice and guidance from someone in house, or, so you can do individuals or large groups.

So those are the kinds of things from the paper and pencil to the online to the in depth assessment to obviously the interview type, and we don't do anything without it, quite frankly. I mean, I think there's so much that is left to chance and intuition and instinct, especially when they're making senior calls. We simply would not advise a client to do anything unless they had done some baseline assessment.

If I can I, I am just going to tell you an interesting little story, one of my clients had done full competency work around their next level managers, were promoting them, had them in the roles, said, "We're not seeing some of the right things". We happened to have worked with the client for a while doing leadership assessments, so we took our baseline leadership assessments we had done, added some other assessments, did a validation study of all the people who had been promoted over the last five years, and found out that three of the five predictors they were using were no longer valid.

Steve

Wow, so they were basically making decisions based on information that wasn't relevant to performance.

Catherine

Absolutely, and so when I say assessment, I go, it's such a valuable objective metric.

Steve

It's funny, I had a similar story with a client where we looked at 360 assessment data, and looked at promotion rates, and they had a bunch of competencies having to do with getting along with others, and of course had the driving for results competency, and they found out that the only competency that made a difference was driving for results, all their promotion was based on that, and the result was, they were having real issues with their culture, as far as people being run over, and when you went back and looked at their assessment data, you said, "Well, it's no wonder—you don't reward any behavior other than this one."

Catherine

Absolutely, and I think really it's an education thing, because people always think of diagnostics as being pass/fail, good/bad, and we're trying to promote it that these are enablers and educators in a world where we don't have time to get all the information, we don't have enough observations because we are simply not available to see people in action, that there needs to be some leveller. Simply, as well, if you just took the different generations and levels coming to the workplace, I mean the whole sense of organizational justice and fairness is a huge factor. So we have to have some way of demonstrating that we are indeed doing something that is an equaliser, that's fair, that's predictive and also keeps people anchored and committed to the organization.

Steve

Yeah, I totally agree, at one time when people talked about assessments, they go off and they say, "Well, are these assessments a 100% accurate?", and you're like, "No, but they're a lot better thanthe alternative, which is a manager saying, "Yeah, you kind of look like me, you know", which is not fair at all!"

I have a question, you made a great comment, you said you are paid to tell executives things that other people would get fired if they told them?

Catherine

Right, yes.

Steve

I bet that resonates with a lot of people in our audience,where you have, and I'm sure you've seen this issue—you have somebody who's very bright, who's very successful, maybe at the top of the organization, and people are seeing them do things, and they're going, "That really doesn't make sense, but if I tell them, who am I? I'm not nearly as successful as that person, and why would they listen to me, and why wouldn't they just dismiss me out of hand?" How would you recommend for somebody in an organization, is there a way to get through to a leader who is saying, "Look, that classic what got you here isn't going to get you to the next step, but how can I make you aware of this before you make that critical mistake?"

Steve

I think anyone, I think if you've been around for a long time, at some point you've seen some superstar that keeps using that same hammer over and over again, and all of a sudden you're saying , "You know, it's time for a screwdriver."

Catherine

You know, it's very common. I would say this, I think it starts with the confidence in yourself and the belief that you have value to add. I think if you don't have that, you can't say anything because you are always making it about you, you're not making it about the client or the individual you are trying to help. And the other thing is, I would make the assumption that, if you are saying something with no ill intent, no matter how badly you say it, the receiver will hear it, right, and if they get defensive, then you need lines like, "You know what, I am sorry my—intent was not to put you on the defensive, but I think this is meaningful and useful information for you to have that may not come through another source. I don't have any personal attachment to it", or you could say, sometimes you also want to figure out what is their goal and ambition and desire and try to figure out, how do I link it to that, so I've got a guy who's the CEO and he is trying to become much more sensitive—aren't they all?—much more sensitive and responsive, and I said, "You know, I have observed in meetings that, because you are so bright, your patience level is limited and so therefore your intellect overrides your interpersonal sensitivity, and you need to find a way to balance those two, otherwise people will not take the comments right." So I need to be pretty creative in terms of how I position it, how I link it to something that's important to them, but to me it starts with not making about it me, and I think that is where we make huge mistakes.

Steve

That is a great example. When you think about this, and you've worked with these very senior leaders, and so often people, there's no strength if it does not contain some weaknesses, so like you said, this person, their problem is they were so bright that they were impatient with other people whose brains just didn't move as fast as that person.

From your experience working with lots of executives, are there any real common trends or patterns you would give to people that are moving up in an organization, to say, "Look, as you're moving through your career, these are the things that I keep seeing again and again that are derailers, or these are ways you can avoid them."

Catherine

Well there's probably some common things that we all hear all the time, but I'm just going to talk from some experience I had recently. I have got the CEO of a hospital, and she bypasses all niceties and goes directly to the zingers, so I said, "I want you to look at your handwriting", I said, "not that I'm a handwriting expert, but apparently if you have lines that lead into your letters it shows there's at least some lead up to what you are going to say." I said, "Every one of your letters is a direct hit to the page, so I think that is a real problem." I think people who have a direct hit to the page, who don't have any lead in, I call them "on ramps", the people without on ramps to get to the main message almost always get in trouble, because they shut people down before they even get to the main message. I think failing to be civilized basically in one's interaction within a team setting, either shutting down, backing out, not being responsive, not being seen as collaborative or connected, people again will shut you out, and you think about it as you go up the organization, you need to have people want to listen to you and be part of what you are doing. I think arrogance is still a frightening one for me, and I'm going to tell you, I've developed this theory called the "terrible thirty-threes".

Steve

Please tell.

Catherine

Because a significant number of the people that we end up coaching are around the age of 33, and I've figured out they are a bit like terrible twos. They want to go beyond the end of the driveway but we really know it's not safe. They think they can do everything themselves without getting any help. They don't want any protection whatsoever, no helmets, no kneepads, nothing, and their intellect or their curiosity is greater than their actual capacity to grasp what they are going to confront, and so I am finding they're, and I'm going to go to another theory, is these are the people that are blackmailing me, and they blackmail me because they come into the organization, we think we've aligned them, we think that we selected them properly and aligned them properly, and you get them there and all of a sudden they blackmail you: "I'm not getting what I want fast enough, I'm not getting the scope that I want, I'm not getting the exposure I want, by the way now you're not paying me enough and someone else is going to pay me more, and by the way I want the title." So you ask me what's going to get you into trouble—those kinds of behaviors, exaggerated at a young age, tends to get you an aura like a skunk a bit, that everybody knows about you, and it's very hard to dispel that, it's very hard to be seen as someone, and I cannot believe a derailer sometimes has nothing to do with you, but has to do with the people around you who are making decisions who have a very long term memory.

Steve

It was a classic, it doesn't matter why you did it, it matters in people's perceptions of who you are as a result of what you did, and they remember, people remember perceptions a lot and attributions a lot longer than they remember behaviors.

Catherine

Right, and I go back to your question more specifically around what are derailers, I think is that it's a mismatch, I think if our selection processes are not aligned to our processes to align people to the culture and value, we are then not providing them with the appropriate development and not providing with the appropriate ability to develop. I think we in fact along the way create the conditions of derailment, because we are not providing an integrated approach to have somebody's life cycle in the organization, and so what happens is, anybody whose needs are not being satisfied is going to act out in some way, and it may not always be the same way. So the clearer we are about who it is, whom it is we've hired and what needs that we have to meet and we have evaluated from a baseline and we know how to develop them and coach them and keep them in line, their little negative heads are going to rear themselves from time to time, and it's our ability to help somebody through it.

Steve

I think that is great, I love the "terrible thirty-threes", that's a great comment, and part of it, when you were saying that too, the behaviors you were talking, about a lot of people will say, "Well that's because they are Gen Y or Gen X or whatever", to me it's a cop out response, it's like saying no, they're people, they're high potential people, and the key, what I'm hearing you saying, please check me if this is not right is, the key to this is, this is like a developmental stage people go through, just like the terrible twos, and the key to helping them through that stage successfully is to help them work through which is almost like a natural development stage give them the opportunity to succeed and not just leave it on their own to figure it out.

Catherine

Are you talking, it would be a human resource person saying it, or anyone?

Catherine

100%, and I go back to, all of our work is based on assessment, because these are the people that are "Show it to me, prove it to me, and now", and so using assessment has proven to be an extraordinarily helpful way to take groups of people and help them advance in the organization. I call it their personal GPS, because you help them figure—they plug in where they want to go, you give them the alternate routes they can get there.

That's to another, by the way, another innovative kind of thing that we have been working with here and that is, how do you help people to manage their way through the organization? Well, we've started using simulations which people can tap into on their own at their leisure and like a game, and see how well they do, and we're working on one right now which is actually for managers around how to help managers be better coaches, so we've got a coaching simulation, which is very exciting which we are launching in a few months. And then there is the notion of I'm thinking, you know how when you go to a museum or an art gallery, and you want to walk through and look at the paintings, but you want to go through at your own pace, you buy a headset and you buy a little recorder? I'm thinking we have to also create that in the environment, so that people can get that development by taking these self-directed things that are mobile and not sitting at a computer, not waiting on somebody else, that allow them to work their way through different stages in the organization. It's not difficult to do, we just need to be as HR and business professionals, we just need to be clever and innovative about how we are going to change the world to reflect the Facebook stuff and the blogs. We need to bring that all into the workplace, and I think derailing also comes, the organization causes people to derail by not creating an environment which is somewhat similar to the environment that they live in day to day.

Steve

Well, one of the things that I'm hearing with these assessments, they'rere like mirrors to give people feedback, and make it easy for people to have access to those mirrors and helping them understand what they're seeing as well, but I like that idea of the simulation and when you go through an assessment, I remember I've used a lot of assessments and had feedback, and one of the things especially with a lot of these, you go, "Look, I'm not going to tell you that this assessment says you are this kind of person, but I can tell you that people that describe themselves the way you have statistically tend to have these behaviors and this is what a result of it is."

Catherine

I want to just talk a little bit about what you guys do, because I think the SuccessFactors platform is exactly what most companies need, they need some kind of easy to use technology that's expandable, can expand or contract for the size of an organization, that allows people to have easy access to information, and you need to have that on people and then you plug in information around assessment or whatever, it's just I think that everybody should have access in an organization, people who are managing people, to stuff that gets them all on the same platform, so to speak, so they're using the same information, it's just I mean technologically, we have to be there, when you don't have time to talk to one another.

Steve

Yeah, which is sad, but the good news is that technology makes these things like your online coaching assessment readily available to everyone, where historically you had to fly somewhere to get that sort of assessment center, it was very limited to a very small few.

I want to thank you very much for appearing on People Performance Radio, I have learned a ton and I look forward to talking to you again.

Catherine

Thank you, and thank you so much for inviting me, and I enjoyed it as well.

Zoe

Hi, this is Zoe. Coming soon in the UK, a new series of podcast interviews focused on talent in uncertainty. Tune in to find out more on how Cable and Wireless, Premier Farnell, Lloyds TSB and the Lancaster Hotel Group are using SuccessFactors to address their business challenges.

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