Worried about your next generation of leaders?

You’re not alone. According to a new survey about leadership skills from Pearson and Executive Development Associates Inc. (EDA), 57% of business executives said their leadership talent pipeline was the same or weaker today than it was two years ago. Seventy-five percent said increasing bench strength will be their top business priority for the next two to three years. Is this too little too effort? 

When asked what skills were needed to assume executive positions within the next three to five years, respondents cited strategic thinking, leading change, the ability to create a vision and engage others around it, the ability to inspire, and the ability to understand how the total enterprise works. But the respondents also agreed these were the very skills lacking in their current talent pool.

The right successor must have just the right blend of personality, time and experience. And with a more complex and faster changing marketplace destined to be our future, the ability to deal with ambiguity and paradox is paramount. This combination requires innate talent plus development.  Creating this competency can take years and many people just are not equipped to ascend to the role. And others who have the skills and experience aren’t willing to give up their personal and family lives in exchange for a promotion and title. What motivated the Baby Boomers doesn’t motivate Gen X and Gen Y.

In addition to lack of skills, a leadership shortage is all but a done deal. When the Baby Boomers finally decide to slow down or retire, pure demographics will stall the succession. Gen X, the succeeding generation, is little more than half the size of the Boomers. And many Gen X and Gen Y are putting family before careers. 

One more glitch: while three to five years may not be enough time to develop the next generation of leaders, it might also be too long in a competitive market. Many talented Gen X are tired of waiting for the Boomers to get out of the way. As the economy is rebounding, job  offers will start coming in. It is already happening. Competitors and emerging companies are scouring the job market for talent and your next leader could be their target.

For good and bad reasons, many organizations are slow to get involved with social media. It’s a mistake — a big mistake. A wait-and-see attitude might have worked in the past, but it’s a clear indication how out of touch management is with what’s happening in their marketplace.

One critical reason to start building a fan base on Facebook or followers on Twitter today is to have an attentive audience when you need them. To do that you need to be available when they need you, not when you decide the time is right. That might be too late.

Take Toyota for instance. Who would have thought that one of the most reliable brands in history would manage its first major recall so poorly? Yes, I credit Toyota for their candor and unprecedented decision of this magnitude to halt all sales of recalled vehicles. But as far as responding to questions, dealers are in the dark. Customers are angry. 

At least that’s what you hear and read in the traditional media. I wondered if that was the whole story. So in the words of Paul Harvey, here’s the “rest of the story.”

Toyota’s Facebook presence is a story of success and missed opportunity.

First, the missed opportunity. 

The first thing I did when I landed on Toyota’s Fan Page was look for the number of fans. Since a week has passed since Toyota announced the recall, I was expecting fans for this popular brand would be in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. My expectation was promptly crushed. Less than 70,000 fans were following Toyota. In what could be one of the biggest threats to a brand’s reputation in history, Toyota has a fraction of a presence compared to other popular brands — Coca Cola, Starbucks, Red Bull. 

So with only 70,000 member — are they kidding me? Coca Cola has over 4.2 million fans. Red Bull has 2.2 million. Starbucks has 5.2 million. Even brands with questionable customer loyalty like AT&T and Verizon had more fans than Toyota, with 230,000 and 835,000 fans respectively.

Those are the numbers I expected from Toyota. With a demographic base that extends from young drivers in their teens to octogenarians, why wouldn’t they have built a presence on Facebook months ago like other industry leaders? Was it fear of negativity? Was it arrogance? How could a brand so widely applauded for its laser focus on customer service and quality turn a deaf ear to the most popular communication medium today? Or did they look to their industry peers, competitors Ford (70,000 fans) and GM (107,000), and become complacent that they were doing enough already? 

Whatever their reason (or excuse) Toyota missed a great opportunity to engage with their customers in real-time to keep a pulse on the reaction during this crisis and put a lid on bad publicity. With millions of customers in its database, a fan base of 70,000 just plain sucks. 

Within this black Toyota cloud however is a silver lining and two valuable lessons for every organization.

Continue reading.

What business hasn’t been forced to cut back and still do more to promote their business?  Non-profits have been particularly hard hit and that makes using social media to connect with donors, volunteers, and the community a near-perfect solution.  Yes, it takes some time but the entry cost is almost nothing and the potential is unlimited.  And once you get started, I can almost guarantee you that people passionate about your cause will generate passionate conversation to promote your cause and value. 

This past Wednesday I had a great day at Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore Resource Day.  The seminar was a sell-out and the enthusiasm in the room was palpable.  It’s so rewarding to see people passionate about what they do. 

Listen to what just a few participants had to say about the workshop “Link Me, Tweet Me, Friend Me” and how they plan to use social media.

If you live on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, you’ll want to register today for these new courses just added to the fall schedule at Wor-Wic Community College. (If you live outside the region, contact Ira S Wolfe about on-site or web-based classes.)

Social Media 101: Link Me, Tweet Me, Friend Me
Wor-Wic Community College
Jan 28/Feb 4 – 2 night course
6:30 PM to 9:30 PM

Marketing Your Business Using Facebook
Ocean City (MD) Chamber of Commerce
Feb 3 – Lunch ‘n Learn
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM

Marketing Your Business Using Facebook
Wor-Wic Community College
Feb 11-25 or Mar 17-31 – 3 nights each course
6:30 PM to 9:30 PM

But what happens when the manager slides open the envelope, removes the card, and the note looks like it was written by a third grader. What kind of impression does that make? Is it any worse than receiving the following message on your Blackberry from your top candidate: “TYVM 4 t interview.”  (Translation = thank you very much for the interview.)

In defense of a generation criticized for sending texts instead of a handwritten note, consider this. Unknown to many hiring managers, even those in their 30s and 40s, is the little-publicized trend that cursive writing has all but been phased out of many school’s curriculum.

Taught for more than 300 years in the United States, cursive writing has been reduced to an independent study, an “as-we-have-time” course in second or third grade. The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.

Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson through sixth grade. Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, the most widely used penmanship curriculum, reports that, when cursive writing peaked in the 1940s and ’50s, most teachers insisted on as much as two hours a week. But a 2003 Vanderbilt University survey of primary-grade teachers found that most now spend 10 minutes a day or less on the subject. To adapt to this new reality, the Zaner-Bloser method has been changed to a 15-minute daily plan. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15% of the almost 1.5 million students who took the test wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed — in block letters.

For traditionalists, the demise of cursive is an outrage — the loss of a skill, even an art form. But proponents arguing for a young population that is better prepared to work in digital world say there’s no point in wasting students’ time to teach a vestigial skill in a computer age.

The first edge of a gigantic wave of U.S. students graduating from high school and school who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades is just hitting the workplace. Not only will these students struggle with writing cursive — they can’t read it either.

Ironically, this problem isn’t isolated to poor-performing students, but the best and the brightest. Why? High-performing students are introduced to computers early in their education and rarely, if ever, are required to write longhand. They are never required to learn the skill of writing, or even reading, cursive script. They are taught keyboarding. Just as the pencil replaced charcoal and the ballpoint pen replaced the quill, bits and bytes will replace cursive writing as the primary mode of producing “printed” media.

Many educators shrug at the problem. When the top priority is to teach technology, foreign languages and the material required to pass standardized tests, penmanship instruction just doesn’t seem that important.

So the next time you get a digital message loaded with text lingo or a thank you note that looks like chicken scratch, pause for a moment. Take a deep breath. Then ask yourself: What if the brightest and most talented candidates applying for the job don’t know how to write cursive?  Does it really matter? Will cursive writing improve their performance? Or is this just more sign that the change is really difficult to accept.

Previously posted on Bizmore.com

Everybody’s Fine. Robert DeNiro, playing a recently widowed father of four, discovers that his children have been telling him only what he wants to hear because he held each of them to his expectations, not theirs.

But most poignant was his advice to his most troubled son. As a kid, David wanted to paint. I’m paraphrasing here but DeNiro’s character told David, “don’t be just a painter, become an artist.” David did become an artist. But he also became a troubled soul and unfortunately died a tragic death. In reflecting back, DeNiro talks to David sorrowfully tells him “to paint.”

When I returned home, I quickly “googled” an article I read recently in Time magazine about  the “insanity” of “overparenting.” In it Carl Honoré, author of Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting, recalled his son’s reaction to learning he was getting an art tutor to help him draw better. “He look[ed] at me like I [was] from outer space,” Honoré said. “‘I just wanna draw,’ he [told] me. ‘Why do grownups have to take over everything?’”

The Time article diagnosed the scenario as a classic case of helicopter parenting. I’ve written and spoken about it for several years. I even devoted a chapter to it in my book:

…we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old’s “pencil-holding deficiency,” hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — “helicopter parents,” teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions.

Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and “Kinderkords” (also known as leashes; they allow “three full feet of freedom for both you and your child”) and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don’t come prepadded)…

Overparenting’s been around a long time. Douglas MacArthur’s mom Pinky reportedly moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. In the 1960s and 1970s the pendulum swung the other way. With Baby Boomers reprioritizing careers over kids, the term latch-key kid was coined to denote a generation of kids fending for themselves while their parents climbed the ladder. When these kids entered the workforce as Generation X, free agency and work-life balance hit the proverbial work ethic fan.

But in the 1990s the needle shifted again, but this time it went way past the red line. Parents stopped letting kids out of their sight. Welcome to a generation raised by helicopter parents. Parents who were raised walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door forbid their kids to do the same. The percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label “Remove Child Before Folding.” Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to ‘97, and homework more than doubled.

Parents became so obsessed with their kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development. The competition to get your child enrolled into top-flight nursery schools became more fierce than getting an academic scholarship into an Ivy League school. High school teachers began to receive irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as “crispies,” who arrived at college already burned out, and “teacups,” who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress.

Some elementary schools had to institute a “no rescue” policy to prevent the daily onslaught of parents dropping in to deliver forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks. Many colleges have a “director of parent programs” to run regional groups so moms and dads can meet fellow college parents or attend special classes where they learn school cheers. Others employ “parent cops” so that during orientation, course registration and Parent Days, the faculty and administration isn’t attacked by parents demanding to know why their child isn’t at the top of the class.

What should come as a welcome relief to teachers and employers, a backlash against overparenting has been building for years (although the teachers and parents who seem to be doing the most griping are the most offensive helicopter parents). The shift is no less prominent than what’s printed these days on toddler tees. We’ve gone from “Baby on Board” to Honestbaby.com selling baby T-shirts that say “I’ll walk when I’m good and ready.” This helicopter parent insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful.

Grounding the hovering helicopter parent won’t be easy. Parental advice from “experts” has been shaping the parenting style for years: from D.H. Lawrence (who said in 1918: “How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning.”) to Dr Benjamin Spock, Dear Abby, Oprah and Dr.Phil. But the lag time between the change in child-rearing philosophy and mature offspring takes a generation. And for those adult-age children raised by the not-so-perfect parent, there is no instant replay to reverse the decisions.

By the time parents recognize the error of their ways, the children have already been molded and shaped. While the shift away from overparenting is obviously well underway, it will take years to shift the attitudes and behaviors of the children. Generation X latch-key kids, the offspring of Baby Boomers, shaped recruiting, retention and business strategies for the past two decades. Their attitudes toward work ethic, communication, career planning and more lingered long after they were out from under the short reach of their parents. Generation Y, nearly double the size of Gen X, is now entering the workforce.

Even if their hovering parents are grounded, the “kids are out of the bag” and standing at employers’ doorsteps. 

Previously posted on Bizmore.com

I received this as a blonde joke but thought it was more apropos as the ultimate geek and geezer conversation!

During a recent password audit, it was found that one of the geezer employees was using the following password:

          MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento

When a geek co-worker asked why such a long password, she said:

 ”I was told that it had to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital………”

“There are those who work all day. Those who dream all day. And those who spend an hour dreaming before setting to work to fulfill those dreams. Go into the third category because there’s virtually no competition.” Steven J Ross

While I’m the first to admit that generational gaps are as much the result of attitude as they are with age, age differences sure make conversations interesting… if not fun.   Just a few weeks ago, Roddy White, wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons, celebrated his 90-yard touchdown run with a somersault.  The referees rewarded White with an unsportsmanlike penalty for excessive celebration. (There’s probably another story in there about rules penalizing employees from celebrating but I’ll leave that for another day.) White’s coach, Mike Smith, joked afterwards about how he addressed White for his behavior. Their conversation demonstrates how a simple conversation reveals the most basic gap between generations:

 I told him [White] if he’s going to do it, it needs to be Olga Korbut. And he looked at me like he doesn’t know who Olga Korbut is. Then I told him, ‘Well, maybe Mary Lou Retton.’ And then I figure that’s ‘86, he doesn’t know who Mary Lou Retton is. It went right over his head and my head.

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