Connect the dots from statements to actionable insights

Posted on September 12, 2016 by joannegoveas

The face of leadership has changed dramatically over the past few years. Today, executives and directors need to have a high level of financial literacy in order to better fulfill their leadership mandate. But what does that look like, exactly?

Successful leaders can navigate between strategy and operations using financial statements and ratios. They have a context for financial information that lets them build a framework of strategic thinking based on solid financial measures, but in order to get there, they need to already speak the language.

You can’t ask the right questions if you don’t know what those questions are. It’s the difference between seeing the dots and being able to connect them.

And it’s not just reading and interpreting charts and graphs. Successful leaders need to fully understand the roles and responsibilities of the audit committee, management, and auditors in the reporting process: how they interact and what their priorities will be. How do the financials impact the strategic objectives of different business units as well as the organization as a whole? When you develop the ability to connect strategy and operations, you can truly begin to maximize value for your organization.

Proper analysis of financial data guides leaders in their decision making, helps ensure due diligence, and have an immediate impact on their organization and in the boardroom.

You can build and develop your financial literacy skills this fall at Rotman’s Financial Literacy program. Apply now.

What the C-suite looks for in Senior Management

Posted on August 16, 2016 by joannegoveas

Being an experienced manager isn’t enough to help you move into a more senior position any more. To succeed in today’s rapidly changing world, great managers need to develop their leadership capabilities to continue your journey to senior leadership.

Here are some of the skills the c-suite is looking for when they think about promoting internally:

Holistic thinking
Think more broadly about the success of your organization. More than just your department or division, how can you help the entire business unit or enterprise? How can you work more closely with and support other business functions?

Understanding the relationships between multiple functional areas is key to integrating their projects and activities so the entire organization can succeed.

Conflict resolution and negotiation skills
By thinking more about your counterparts in other business units you can understand where they’re coming from and why conflicting objectives are so common. With a better understanding of the entire organization, you can become a trusted resource outside of your unit.

There’s always room for improvement, especially when it comes to conflict resolution and negotiation. By developing the skills and approaches to facilitate effective conflict resolution you can get down to the real issues with less wasted time.

A strategic mindset
A good strategy isn’t handed down from the most senior member of your organization – it’s developed based on information from all levels of the organization, and should evolve with the changing needs of your business. Truly great leaders know how to develop plans and strategies to minimize conflicting objectives and reduce barriers to collaboration, but they’re also flexible and willing to adapt and change.

Appreciate the many and varied factors both inside and outside your organization that drive strategic decision making, and use them to guide your planning.

Problem solving
There’s nothing wrong with solving a problem intuitively, but there’s a great deal of additional value to be found in learning and applying a strategic model of problem solving. You can enhance your ability to drive innovation, evaluate business opportunities, and even better negotiate by using model-based problem solving and design thinking principles.

Coaching
And of course, a great leader has great mentors and coaches. A good coach will review how you handle challenges on the job and work with you to develop a personalized action learning plan.

Rotman’s Strategic Business Leadership program addresses all of these skills and more, and is designed to help you expand your influence and effectiveness within your organization. Apply now.

Building Leaders—An Inside Look at Rotman’s Executive Leadership Program

Posted on May 20, 2016 by joannegoveas

(Jim Fisher, Rose Patten and Joseph Natale at the networking reception)

“I believe that everyone has within themselves the capability to lead if they only know how to break the idea of leadership into understandable chunks and then integrate it back into a more powerful whole,” Jim Fisher, The Thoughtful Leader.

Earlier this month, I got to sit in a room filled with executives from all sectors of Canada as they started their thoughtful journey through the Rotman Executive Leadership Program.

This transformational program understands that leadership cannot be learned in a week and that it takes time to develop new skills. So, five days of in-class learning are supported with pre- and post- programming to ensure the transfer of leadership skills are strategically reinforced through coaches and advisory boards over the span of eight months.

A month before class, participants completed a 360 assessment. This gave them a robust snapshot of how they’re viewed not just by their direct supervisors but also by their co-workers and direct reports.

Armed with a look at their leadership strengths and competencies for improvement, the class started the program on Monday, May 2 with academic directors Rose Patten, Special Advisor to the President and CEO of BMO Financial Group, board member at SickKids Foundation, and Executive in Residence at Rotman and Jim Fisher, Rotman’s Professor Emeritus and an industry veteran with a long history of leadership in some of Canada’s key organizations. He also happened to create Rotman’s very first Leadership course.

Jim shared his powerful 9-box leadership model, a guide to what leaders need to do well to succeed. Addressing the ‘Big 8’, Rose covered the capabilities each leader needs to develop to implement the 9-box. These two models intersect to help each participant work on a personal leadership development plan.

Faculty and Coaches

Through the course of the week, an all-star cast of Rotman’s finest helped participants understand and practice these leadership skills. Here’s just a snippet of what went on in the classroom:

Nouman Ashraf, a senior fellow at Rotman and a frequent consultant to some of Canada’s biggest organizations, and a firecracker presenter, kicked us off with a lively demonstration of Integrative Thinking: a model-based problem-solving method that embraces tension in opposable ideas to generate innovation. He also covered a leader’s role in creating a safe environment to foster integrative thinking.
Stefanie Schram of Rotman’s DesignWorks took us through a 5-step cascading model on how strategy really works including case studies on the model in practice. Stephanie has used this model while working with some Fortune 500 companies and emphasized the importance of paying equal attention to each step in the cascade.
Stéphane Côté, director of Rotman’s PhD program who serves on editorial boards for a number of publications, discussed how leaders can use emotional intelligence to improve self-awareness and regulation as well as any social environment. The class then worked in teams on a case to test the model.
Geoff Leonardelli, Rotman’s expert on teams, organizational behavior and managerial negotiations, covered the five different models for team-based decisions and had the class involved in a highly engaging team exercise to test their understanding of the concepts.
John Oesch, a published authority in organizational behavior, decision-making and negotiations covered the challenges and best practices around executive communication and got the class to practice using a difficult conversation case.

Additionally, over the course of four days, Professor Julie McCarthy, who has developed effective performance management systems for both private and public corporations, used a four-part model to help our executives develop physical, mental, emotional and value-driven resiliency with immediately applicable ways to thrive in what we now accept as continuous partial attention environments.

One of my personal highlights was meeting and listening to Joseph Nataleduring our networking event. The former CEO of Telus was a powerful and inspiring speaker who walked us through the role different people and experiences in his life played in shaping his success and understanding of leadership. He also shared 9 characteristics he looks for in leaders which our participants found particularly insightful.

Each day, Jim and Rose led debrief and closing sessions to help participants tie in learnings to understand how they fit in the 9 box and Big 8 models. In addition to the examples they provided from their work with various organizations over the years, I personally also enjoyed Rose’s impeccable taste in fashion.

On the last day, each team worked with a coach to develop their personal action plans. Then, over the course of the next few months, they will work with their coaches and advisory board members to implement their plans. At their graduation ceremony in October, we’ll have the privilege of hearing how they’ve grown as leaders, their impact on their teams and their organizations. Based on feedback from the last group, we’ve no doubt it will be an inspiring graduation.

To learn more about our programs connect with me at joanne.goveas@rotman.utoronto.ca

Negotiating for Success: Highlights from Rotman

Posted on April 27, 2016 by joannegoveas

Can you leave a negotiation with both you and your counterpart feeling like you won more than your fair shares? That’s what we set out to discover last week at Rotman’s Strategic Negotiations Program.

Packed with some of Rotman’s leading faculty, the four-day program equipped us with a robust toolkit and the flexibility to succeed in a variety of negotiations. Designed for modern learners who want to learn as much from their peers as any expert, our class learned from each other through a series of increasingly complex negotiation exercises.

Geoff Leonardelli, a published authority on leadership, teams and managerial negotiations, kicked off the session with essential foundations. We learned strategies to determine the true value at play during a negotiation, best practices to anchor a negotiation and the tools of both distributive and integrative bargaining.

We ended our first day with a cocktail reception featuring Buzz Hargrove, a legendary labour negotiator and an Officer of the Order of Canada. Buzz shared insights from his decades at the negotiations table and his views on how Canada’s current political climate is shaping the negotiation landscape for some key sectors.

Most people approach negotiations intending to capture value. However, on day two, Glen Whyte, the Marcel Desautels Chair in Integrative Thinking and frequently sought-after consultant for both private and public negotiations, demonstrated strategies to turn negotiations into value-creating opportunities. Value creating and value claiming are often competing processes. However, a successful negotiator does both simultaneously. A key to this approach is relationships and we learned strategies to build trust even in contentious situations. We also learned the value of interest-based problem solving. Teased apart from positions, correctly identifying parties’ interests can be invaluable in breaking impasses, learning to play the right negotiations game and identifying the correct stakeholders.

Our ToolKit and Halls of Negotiations

As the course progressed, we took on increased complexity by tackling the issues of ethics, risk and using agents. Chen-Bo Zhong, a published researcher in ethics, moral psychology, decision-making and unconscious processes, helped us navigate the gaps between the law and ethics in challenging situations.

Next, we addressed the dynamics, challenges and advantages of team-based negotiations. We worked through best practices of managing teams during both the preparation and negotiation stages to ensure successful outcomes for all your internal stakeholders.

Before tackling the highly complex multi-party, multi-issue negotiations cases, John Oesch, an expert in organizational behaviour, demonstrated how to use persuasion and influence in bargaining especially during multi-party negotiations when influencing the process can be as pivotal to securing a successful outcome as the negotiation itself.

Our class came from a variety of functions, industries and countries which helped us experience cultural differences that can shape the process and outcome of negotiations. Each participant completed a pre-program survey that assessed their approach to negotiations. Then, through the course of the program, we provided feedback on our counterparts and team members so each participant will receive an in-depth report on their performance through the course and areas for development as they take back their skills to raise their impact in their workplaces.

If you have questions about the program call me anytime at 416.946.0722.

Highlights from Rotman’s Leading Strategic Change program

Posted on April 19, 2016 by joannegoveas

Last week, we welcomed a diverse group of professionals from the private and public sectors of Canada, the US, and as far away as New Zealand, to our Leading Strategic Change program. The program uses a model-based problem solving approach to help participants effectively lead transformative initiatives at their organizations.

John Oesch, a published authority on change management, who also happens to have impeccable comedic timing, led the five-day program. With a background in organizational behavior, decision-making and negotiations, John presented learnings from diverse fields through the course of the week.

As John explained, the rate of change in business is much quicker than in most other fields. However, a thoughtful process during the change can be the difference between a successful initiative embraced by all stakeholders or a tumultuous change that heightens anxiety and resistance to the initiative.

On day one, John was joined by Rick Powers, a leading expert on corporate strategy, governance and law. Using case studies, Rick helped the class frame their change initiatives within the context of their organization’s strategy. Next, using the principles of Integrative Thinking, participants began analyzing a series of best-in-class models of change management and began modifying these to meet the unique needs of their organization.

Later, the class explored the psychology behind reactions to change and the role leaders have in managing the level of anxiety during transition. They also learned best practices to identify, understand and work with resistors to change. Finally, the class learned how to master procedural justice: the perceived fairness behind the process of change.

David Weiss at Rotman’s Leading Strategic Change

Guest speaker, Dr. David Weiss, a sought after global consultant on change management to some of the world’s biggest firms, helped participants synthesize the learnings from previous sessions. Through focused exercises, he also helped them develop effective story-telling techniques to inspire the action necessary to implement change.

Next, using relevant case studies, participants tested their learnings by evaluating the actions of key players during different stages of transitions.

Armed with change-management theories, key models and case study analyses, participants began working on their own change management models in consultations with faculty.

On our final day, each participant presented their change model and benefited from feedback from David Weiss, John Oesch and their team members. They now return to their organizations with a robust customized model and strategies to sustain their initiatives through the transition.

As always, participants benefited from the wealth of knowledge of their classmates. A highly engaged group, they were eager to share their experiences (both cautionary tales and best practices). They now have an expanded network ready to serve as consultants as they each work through their exciting initiatives.

To learn more about our programs connect with me at joanne.goveas@rotman.utoronto.ca