by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
There’s this tendency to say to people: “I want you to get good results. But I also want to review you along the way, I want you to tell me how you’re getting those results and I want you to review all these processes and everything else.”
And what that does is, it turns experts into novices. The reason is that most expert knowledge is tacit knowledge. In order for me to permit you to use that passive knowledge, I can’t force you to make extremely explicit exactly what you’re doing.
So I need to be clear about what we’re trying to achieve and I need to share that with you; and then I need to let you go do it, and not impose all this monitoring on you along the way.
–Jeffrey Pfeffer
Stanford University
Strategy & Business 3Q1998
by Tony Mayo | Client Comments
Tony Mayo is the executive’s career coach. His expertise, professionalism, and RESULTS are impressive. My experience in evaluating career goals, strategy and navigation through the waters of change, with Tony’s coaching, have landed me my dream situation.
When one is challenged with questions regarding trust, motivation, advice, and crisis management, Tony will provide honest, impartial assistance to help you make the right decisions with the BIG picture in mind.
I give Tony the highest, unreserved, recommendation as a career coach for individuals or companies.
—Dr. Valerie Armstead
Professor of Anesthesiology
St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
A small group of leaders in the DC Metro area is interviewing potential new members for their coaching group. Details below or you can download a brochure here: http://tiny.cc/gsvsop
Your organization and your responsibilities can grow only as fast as you do. Participate in Genuine Success: Vitality, Service, and Outstanding Performance (GS:VSOP) to develop your expertise in the only career strategy that is endlessly scalable. Leadership: the ability to get things done with and through other people.
GS:VSOP is a continuing program to provide business people with structure, tools, and support to produce nonlinear, unpredicted, massive results at work while enjoying a high level of personal satisfaction, fulfillment, and vitality.
GS:VSOP’s unique mix of traditional business principles, cutting-edge brain science, powerful one-to-one coaching, and ancient disciplines assures you a productive and profitable experience.
Each month, you will grow as a leader through a full day of group learning with other successful leaders; participate in one-to-one coaching sessions with your group leader; be held accountable for implementing your vision with follow-up sessions and field practice.
Program topics include influence and persuasion, organization and planning, finance, self-management and growth, focus and concentration, integrity, communication, health, and fitness. See brochure for more details.
This program is for leaders who:
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You’ll learn why you behave the way you do and how to alter your conversations for greater performance and how to consistently achieve significant measurable organization-wide improvements.
Schedule a conversation with Tony Mayo to find out if this program is right for you by clicking here.
To me, leadership is a journey toward wholeness.
A leader’s journey starts by looking inward to understand, “Why am I here?” and “What is it that I’m here to do?”
–- Joe Jaworski, MIT
Society for Organizational Learning
Genuine Success:
Vitality, Service, & Outstanding Performance
A Program for Leaders
Committed to Workplaces of
Humanity & Prosperity
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills
The New York Times recently ran a nice article about how Google–in its usual highly-analytic, data-driven way–measured the results of different management behaviors amongst its own workforce. The recommendations that emerged from this research will be familiar to readers of this blog.
I wish these were practiced as often as I preach them!
Google’s Project Oxygen
Eight Good Behaviors
Be a good coach
Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.
Have regular (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills
I advocate leadership that allows employees to contribute, create, and grow. I have several articles on this blog detailing the costs of micro-management and the benefits of treating employees as adults (click here to read them). I am thrilled to see the results achieved by the $2.6 billion dollar HTC under the leadership of a CEO who clearly walks this talk, Vineet Nayar. He is interviewed in the excellent–and free!–Booz & Co. periodical strategy + business.
For example, detailed financial performance data broken out by business unit is delivered regularly to employees’ desktops. This has stimulated employees to ask more questions, volunteer more ideas, and challenge their managers more often. In turn, everyone is making better decisions — the kind of decisions that directly affect the customer’s experience.
Similarly, in a bold twist on the 360-degree employee appraisal tool, all appraisals are posted on the company’s intranet, and anyone at any level can give feedback on anybody else, including the CEO. As Nayar says, “Good or bad, we all learn from the results.”
—The Thought Leader Interview:
Vineet Nayar
strategy + business
Here is my favorite quote, one that mirrors a key insight I learned the hard way some years ago: “The lesson for me was to never make assumptions about what somebody else wants or thinks. It is very important to ask people what they are thinking.”
There is more in his book, Employees First, Customers Second.
by Tony Mayo | Client Comments
I recently had the privilege of providing executive coaching to a dynamic global entrepreneur selected by the TED Foundation for one of their distinguished fellowships. He shares, below, some of his experience with my executive coaching.
Tony combines entrepreneurial advice and Eastern wisdom to deliver a holistic coaching experience. He is a keen listener; often, I would begin a session talking about my weekend or some other topic that felt like small talk–and I would be stunned by Tony’s ability to draw out patterns and lessons from the tiniest details of my life.
Within a few weeks of working with Tony, I accomplished the following:
- Committed to a series of improvements in my sales process and marketing strategy, that eventually lead to one million dollars in leads.
- Recommitted to a meditation practice, which I have continued.
- I was able to see clearly how my personal and work lives were one and the same; that I manifested the same behavior regardless of the situation.
I will always be grateful for Tony’s contribution to my growth; I can think of few ways to start 2010 that would have been more powerful than working with him.
—Sandeep Sood, Executive Director
Monsoon Company
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Team Manager Skills
Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions
Excerpted, by Art Kleiner in Strategy+Business, from chapter 2
Here’s how the process works. The day before meeting, your coworker brings you a list of five or six key objectives, detailing her progress on each. During the review on the following day, you simply assess the data and discuss how performance compares with objectives. Depending on the employee, this can be a short thirty-minute process, or take as long as two hours. [If you do this weekly or every day, as you might on a tight deadline or vital project, the meeting might last ten minutes. –Tony]
When an employee comes into your office, she should always bring a pen and paper and be required to take detailed minutes of the meeting. Once the meeting is over, the employee should make a photocopy of the minutes for your file. [This is a bit dated! Have the employee email a summary. For high value employees, use a (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
Experts develop deep domain knowledge that often allows them to exhibit a “sixth sense,” said ChicagoBooth professor James Schrager. … Strategy may be poised to be the next field revolutionized by the same concepts that have made behavioral economics and behavioral finance hotbeds of new ideas.
It all flows from University of Chicago PhD and Nobel laureate Herb Simon, who introduced the concept of bounded rationality that states that people don’t consider all alternatives as they decide most things, only a subset. The way we choose that subset is often the secret to how well–or poorly–our decision will turn out.
Simon indicated it took about ten years to be really good at something. Once there, you develop an “intuition” about how to make decisions. Simon believed these intuitions, although seemingly appearing from nowhere and often without conscious thought, are patterns you’ve previously learned. It is these patterns that can be of most use to strategists.
—ChicagoBooth News
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals
People are often surprised that I do not read popular business magazines, the latest management books, or eagerly attend speeches by top executives and successful entrepreneurs. I am certainly not knowledge averse; I read a great deal and love information. I am very interested in business and know a lot about it. Clients know that there is seldom an aspect of their enterprise I can not comment upon usefully. I just do not get my data from the usual sources.
I just came across an article in the California Management Review that explains one reason that reading most business journalism and executive memoirs is worse than useless. Phil Rosenzweig’s article, Misunderstanding the Nature of Company Performance: The Halo Effect and Other Business Delusions and his book shows that bad science and poor logic permeate the business press. Rosenzweig’s demolition of the over-praised Good to Great books is especially satisfying.
…it’s easy for pundits and professors to claim that someone blundered. Decisions that turned out badly are castigated as bad decisions. However, these sorts of judgments are erroneous, made retrospectively in light of what we know to have happened subsequently. These errors are surprisingly widespread in the business world. They affect not only journalistic accounts about specific companies, but also undermine the data used for large-scale studies about company performance. They lead to a broad misunderstanding of the forces that drive company success and failure. As we will see below, some of the most popular business studies in recent years are undermined by fundamental problems of data integrity.
…
strategy is about choice, and choice involves risk. There are no easy formulas to apply, no tidy plug-and-play solutions that offer a blueprint for success.
by Tony Mayo | Client Comments
Tony has the unique ability to bring out the best in you. In executive coaching sessions, he can articulate thoughts so clearly that you understand yourself and your options better after just a quick conversation.
Because of working with Tony Mayo as my CEO executive coach, I:
- Started one-on-one meetings with my staff, which helps to focus the team on reaching defined goals.
- Learned to let go of guilt for taking time off; taking time off helps to gain perspective and be more productive when at work. [See also, Boss’s Vacation, on this blog.]
- Reduced my operational involvement so I could focus on strategy and building customer relationships.
He is a straight shooter, knows when and how to dig deeper to get to the root of an issue, and stays on top of your goals so you achieve more fulfillment in your own life, personally and professionally.
I HIGHLY recommend him.
The dynamics at the meetings spur insightful dialog among the members to solve real world business problems. I have found myself on many occasions seeing my own situations being addressed in someone else’s discussion. Being the boss can be a lonely job since few understand what we go through. This group has helped me grow both personally and professionally
–Raj Khera, CEO
MailerMailer LLC.
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