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I
Love This Job!
By Ed Yager
Kathleen Gage is the Vice President of Career Development at the Murdock
Group and is arguably one of the best known women in the Salt Lake area.
She owned and ran her own very successful consulting firm for years before
being persuaded to join Murdock. She is now overseeing an aggressive growth
plan with a goal of doubling revenue and multiplying the products and
services through the new Corporate Services Division. In this context
I want to look to the criteria for performance excellence in the leadership
category as defined by Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The questions
asked are these.
1.) How do senior leaders set, communicate, and deploy
organizational values, performance, expectations and a focus on creating
and balancing value for customers and stakeholders?
2.) How do senior leaders establish an environment
for empowerment and innovation?
3.) How do senior leaders set directions and seek future
opportunities?
Kathleen began by referring to the mission statement
on the back of her business card. (Successful leaders continually refer
to a motivating vision. It is their frame of reference and strategy for
everything else they do.) "We are a career training company that
helps people change their leaders by teaching them how to do what they
love for a living:"
Does this carry through in her day to day practice?
"We are an organization of professional people who are contributing
to the success of our clients. Every person here truly believes in what
they are doing - they enjoy it."
How have you proceeded in developing your strategy?
She says there are a number of steps that have combined her own experiences
and ideas with the mission of the corporation. "First, I am continually
reading and surfing the web to find out what is going on, and I talk to
our competition to find out what they are doing. We continually survey
our clients to find out what they need, and we do a lot of partnering,
and creating alliances in order to take advantage of other's experience
and knowledge." (Again demonstrating a critical practice of successful
senior leader who are concerned about the strategies they pursue. They
have an obsession with external events and trends kept in balance with
concern for the internal organizational environment.)
I asked her how she involved and empowered her organization.
I was also interested in how the organization is trained and how the organization
learns. After all, it seems to me that this is a major challenge. If the
Murdock people are expected to coach and counsel their clients, often
very experienced professionals and managers seeking change, who coaches
the coaches? She outlined an aggressive "learning" environment
including weekly staff discussion (where a book of the month is presented
and reviewed among other learning activities), continuous training and
participation in outside seminars and workshops, the maintenance of a
resource center and other activities. Too many executives deny their organizations
true excellence by blaming rather than developing. I have never seen a
championship team that thinks it is okay to have some weak guys on the
team. Training and development is the life blood of excellence.
She described the internal learning process in this
way. "I have a very open door, but people know I want their ideas
and concerns well prepared and thoroughly thought through. I encourage
others to resolve their differences or to resolve conflicts. When I came
on board I wanted to listen to every idea, to involve every employee,
but I just didn't have the time. Now I ask for ideas to be presented in
proposal form. I expect thorough research and details regarding both the
upside and the downside, resources needed, expected results and benefits,
sacrifices needed to assure success. If it benefits the client it will
benefit all of us. We are always searching for win/win solutions."
I asked what is your role in all of this? "I
establish the expectations, and I expect as much as others as I expect
of myself. I don't do anything just to see if they will do it for me.
Part of my job is to set an example by my actions. In this role my actions
will speak volumes. They look to me to see how I will respond. If I make
a mistake I must go to that person and resolve the differences. I have
a huge responsibility to people who entrust me to teach them what they
need to learn so they can be happy in their career."
It is clear to me based on my experience in coaching,
assessing, and training thousands of leaders over the years that the line
between strategy and leadership is very thin. Strategy is inexorably tied
to the heart of the leader. The success of a strategy is tied to performance.
Performance improve as the physical and cultural environment improves.
Each member of the organization commits to the strategy to the degree
his or her perception of the organization, read leaders, changes. If the
leaders do not lead the employee can only conclude that 1.) they do not
care, 2.) employees do not matter, or 3.) they are lazy, incompetent or
both. They can come only to one conclusion -- possibly the organization
isn't worth the effort. This hardly seems possible at Murdock. Kathleen
emphasizes, "We all have our own goals - our own values. Hopefully
we are able to tie into these individual goals ,and integrate those with
the company goals, our client's goals, and our community needs."
Kathleen Gage demonstrates the integration of these two. There is no fancy
leather bound strategic plan, but the strategy is clear, and it is part
of the warp and woof of the entire organization. "I lead from a core
spirit. I feel like I am being guided by some bigger
purpose. I love this job!" she concludes.
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