Understanding When You Are The Problem

You have bad luck.  You keep getting fired, you never get the good projects, or you have really warped coworkers; or maybe, just maybe; (it’s not them, it’s you)? Here are 5 ways to tell if you’re the problem.

You have had multiple micro-managing bosses.

We all know that micro-managing bosses exist.  But, if you’ve had two or three in a row, there’s a real possibility that they aren’t so much micro-managers as they are managers who recognize that you need to be micro-managed.  Some employees don’t know how to get from step A to Step E without a manager spelling how exactly how to do B, C, and D.

Some employees are sloppy with their work.  Formatting is unprofessional.  Typos.  Important questions are left unanswered.

Take a close look at what kind of things your manager is saying to you.  Instead of bristling under the “micro-managing” make an effort to fix those problems before your manager appears.  You may find that as you are more careful and thorough in your work, your manager backs off.

You Get Punished For Behavior Your Coworkers Get Away With

If you show up for work 15 minutes late, the boss reams you out, but if your coworker gets in 20 minutes later than you do, no one says anything to her.  Sometimes that’s an example of managers playing favorites, but sometimes it’s an example that the employee is clueless as to the effects of her actions.

If your job is to answer phones, or you play a critical role in a group project, it matters when you show up at the office.  If, on the other hand, you work independently, have few meetings, and consistently get your work done before the deadline, your manager is less likely to care when you show up.

If your manager is punishing you for behavior that your coworkers do as well, it’s highly likely that he’s attacking this behavior because you’re doing something else wrong, like missing deadlines, holding up other people’s work, or ignoring customers.  Check and see what problems are caused by your mistakes.

Your Coworkers Never Want to Eat Lunch with You

Yes, the office can sometimes have “mean girls” who will pick on people and purposely exclude them.  But, if it’s not just the “cool” people that are not inviting you, but that no one is, and furthermore, when you invite people to go with you, there is hesitance or the just flat out no, then you might be the problem.

Do you have a bad sense of timing?  When everyone else is heads down on a major project, are you the “hey let’s go to lunch”? Person.

Are you a restaurant complainer? If you’re the type that sends your meal back three times because something is wrong with it, other people don’t want to go out with you.

Do you “order expensive” and then split the check evenly? Do you order steak, wine and dessert while your coworkers order sandwiches and soda and then you say, “Hey, let’s just divide the bill evenly.  It’s easier.” Yes, it’s easier to exclude you for your tacky behavior.

Are you a whiner? Yes, misery loves company and coworkers frequently complain to each other at work, but the topics are generally limited to topics of shared misery–the bad boss, the crazy deadlines, etc.  If you’re talking about your loser boyfriend/girlfriend (dump him/her, or get over it, sweetheart), your crushing debt in the same breath as you brag about your new motorcycle, or tell your gruesome childbirth stories to your not similarly enthralled coworkers, then you’re the problem here.

Are you a bit gross? Do you chew with your mouth open?  Forget to use your napkin?  Pack lunches that are excessively smelly?

You Had Multiple Run Ins With Different Racists/Sexists/Ageists

We all know that these people exist, but it’s not ever-present.  If you’re constantly encountering people who are treating you poorly because of your race, gender, age, or other characteristic, it may well be that you’re perceiving something that isn’t there.

Sometimes people are jerks.  Sometimes you’re getting “picked on” because you’re a low performer.  Sometimes people mean no offense when they say things.

It’s a better idea to assume that people aren’t being racist/sexist/whatever, but are rather acting in good faith.  Try to assume this going into your relationships with other people.  If your manager corrects you, honestly evaluate if you need correcting before jumping to the conclusion that you’re being singled out because you’re not 24 and beautiful.

If someone says something that you find offensive, gently correct him or her.  Don’t assume that because you think the statement is racist that the speaker thinks it’s racist.

If your boss or coworker truly is an “…” giving them the benefit of the doubt won’t cause you any harm and it will become obvious later on that they are the true problem.

Everyone You Work With Is Really Stupid

Your boss is an idiot.  His boss is an idiot.  Your coworkers are dumb as rocks.  And, we won’t even talk about the completely incompetent HR department.

Now, there’s a really good chance that you’ll work with one or two people who are dumber than a box of hair.  But, if everyone is, you may need to rethink your definition of stupid.  Are you defining these people as incompetent because they disagree with you?  It may well be that they just disagree with you.

Are you defining them as not so bright because they don’t understand what you are saying?  Is it possible that you are not a good communicator?  Is it possible that you don’t understand what they are saying, and not the other way around?

Whenever there is a problem at work, you need to look at the possibility that the world isn’t out to get you–that you just may be the person who needs to change!

The Right Marketing Plan

A marketing plan should be a written document, not scratching on a cocktail napkin or recalled from memory. To take your business to the next level requires preparing a written marketing action plan every quarter.

Without a 90-day marketing GPS to guide you to your destination, treacherous roadblocks and time-consuming detours can keep you from reaching your goals. Even if you are a one-person sales department, you should know where your leads are coming from.

Try not to look at planning as an obligatory to-do, but as a way to solve tangible problems like generating awareness and improving credibility. Think of it as a way to solve lead generation problems before they arise. Here are some checklist steps to guide you:

1. Attack strategy quarterly. Begin developing a strategy-driven marketing action plan every 90 days. Marketing plays a vital role in successful business ventures, yet many sales people often overlook its systematic implementation. Put down on paper how you are going to do three things:

-- Generate leads for the sales team

-- Build awareness of what your company sells

-- Enhance the credibility of the organization

2. Think strategic first. Too many individuals believe that the tactical plan -- the newsletters, press kits, trade shows, banners, 800-numbers, display advertisements, logos and giveaways -- comes before the strategic plan. Those promotional, publicity and advertising tactics (and there are hundreds to choose from) should be contained within a well-orchestrated marketing action plan. But first create your strategic messages that will generate leads, build awareness and enhance credibility.

3. Update what's happening now. The situation analysis introduces the company and includes:

-- A brief overview of the product or service

-- A brief overview of the personnel involved

-- A past history of the company

-- Its present performance

-- Financial information, if appropriate

4. Profile away. Profiling is a bad word these days, but it works here. The product or service profile provides information regarding the specific items you intend to market. By addressing the following categories, a profile emerges. They include:

-- Position Statement: The niche the product or service is intended to occupy

-- Description: The product or service described in detail

-- Pricing: The methods used to establish pricing. Questions such as, "Will discounts be offered?" are asked

-- Market maturity: The overall market maturity is addressed

-- Quality/Reliability: What level of quality is being portrayed? What's the relation to price?

-- New market potential: The potential size of the market is assessed

-- Delivery of service: An explanation of the service delivery mechanism is given

-- Packaging: Includes overall presentation of the product or service and its delivery

-- Image: The impression customers receive from employees, facility, furnishings, stationary, etc.

5. Make the first the last. The executive summary consists of a one-page, top-level summary of the entire plan. It's placed at the front of the document, but it's the last thing you'll write. Its purpose is to convey the gist of the plan to stakeholders, investors and anyone else who needs to know these facts in a hurry:

-- The scope of the plan in an outlined paragraph

-- The product or service being marketed

-- For whom the plan is being prepared

-- The time period the plan covers

-- The geographic area where the implementation occurs

-- The strategic messages and the tactics to get them to the target markets

If you manage to write two or three paragraphs for each of the topics, you'll end up with plenty. But no more than 10 pages, please. From there, you can refine your tactics. More important, you've taken a big step forward because you've written your strategy down on paper.

Exposing the Reality in Business

I never cease to be amazed at our penchant for self-deception–especially when it clouds our view of reality in regards to our leadership. A leader I once worked for often told me. “Don’t ever believe your own press–good or bad. When you accomplish a few things a crowd may gather & start patting you on the back. If we’re not careful you can soon lose focus and start believing that you are indispensable or entitled to special favors–don’t ever believe it! It’s never really about you; it’s usually about them.

Leaders today, if they are to be truly trustworthy, should be both honest and accountable. The successful leader often is able to surround with persons who learn to help accomplish his/her mission and insulate the leader from distractions. Sometimes the leader loses touch with reality or for various reasons may begin to lose his/her way. He needs those around him to help him stay on course and not lose his bearings. He desperately needs someone to give him honest and accurate feedback in regards to his actions and their impact upon his team and those he would try to lead. The problem is that few people save perhaps those who have a negative motive, would be honest or courageous enough to overcome the discomfort and even danger that could be needed to confront the leader…especially if the leader was in their direct chain of command. In some organizations to tell the leader the truth could be misunderstood.  Unfortunately, the higher a leader raises in an organization the more he is in need of someone to ‘speak the truth in respect’ and the less likely someone will give him honest and immediate feedback regarding his words and his actions. This kind of open two-way communication is desperately needed in order to ensure the leader gets honest feedback and does not yield to the temptation to become careless with the truth.

So who will be the leaders accountability team? How can we, if the need arises’ tell the emperor he has no clothes.  How should a leader recognize this pitfall and break the yoke of insulation surrounding him or her?

The stock price was falling; the business environment was turbulent. Analysts were critical. Yesterday's rising star had become today's football. If you've ever worked in a company going through a rocky time, you will know that the first thing to vanish is trust. The workforce no longer believes that management knows what it is doing, that the business plan still makes sense, that their investment of time will be rewarded. And as trust disintegrates, the company becomes dysfunctional and failure accelerates.

If you are a manger under these circumstances, what should you do?

Doug McCallum led eBay's European business in 2008 after the stock price fell from a high of $56 to around $10, analysts claimed the company had lost its ability to innovate and CEO Meg Whitman had stepped down. Earlier this month speaking to a leadership forum sponsored by Purple Beach, McCallum talked about how the management team got through the crisis.

It wasn't, he said, rocket science, but simple things worked. What he and his team did was this:

-- Weekly videoconference with every employee across the business. It was important that they had to come together physically for this event. Just being in the same room helped to build a sense of solidarity.

-- Reiterating the plan and progress. That this was often repetitive was fine: it signaled that things weren't changing, which also implied they weren't getting worse.

-- Unscripted Q&A. This was the most important thing the leadership team. By being willing to take and address unscripted questions while everyone was watching, the leaders signaled that they were open; that they were hiding nothing and that they were confident enough to be challenged. Devoid of script, props, rules, they stood exposed before their employees and rebuilt their trust.

I was struck that what McCallum said was pretty obvious and straightforward -- but needed to be said. That it was not rocket science, of course, why it worked.

I wonder how many leaders dare emulate their example?

All too often leadership becomes insulated to what is most important.  They become trapped in a bubble, surrounded by a few that manage what they “should know” and what filter the input of what is actually going on.  Being informed is critical.  You are in control of the information you consume.  When you pass that onto others, you eventually lose!

It is true, the larger the organization the more difficult it is to be honestly informed.  You must be subjected to focus with a critical eye.  To solve any problem, or stand up to any challenge, honest information is critical to making the next decision.

The question to you, how honestly informed are you?  And; How honest are you in your information?

Starting Your Own Business?

With U.S. employers still reluctant to hire, more folks are considering starting a small business. But what's better, forming a corporation or a trust? Neither actually. For individuals looking to start small and grow big, I typically suggest forming a limited liability company, or LLC.

Every state allows single-member LLCs. To create one, you will need to file the proper documents with the appropriate state agency and pay filing fees. For example, in New York you will need to file so-called articles of organization and obtain a "department of state filing receipt." You'll also need to advertise the existence of the LLC in a few local business journals and obtain an affidavit of publication.

But before you make a decision on a corporate structure, you first need to understand the legal and tax implications. LLCs shield your personal assets from the liabilities of the business. This means that if your company sinks into debt, banks and other lenders cannot seize your personal property. The only exception is if you signed a personal guarantee on a loan to your business. So a LLC provides legal protection of your assets in much the same way as a corporation. But a LLC has more flexibility when it comes to management and taxes.

When it comes to taxes and tax reporting, LLCs are simpler than corporations. LLCs are "conduit entities," which means that they pass through the taxable income to the owner or members (the individuals who own the LLC). This means that the LLC itself does not pay taxes. Income from the business is instead passed down to the company's members. The members report the profits or losses from the LLC on their personal income tax returns.

For purposes of tax reporting, a single-member LLC is considered a sole proprietorship. The tax reporting for individuals who own a single-member LLC is straightforward. They report the income, expenses and net profit from the LLC on Schedule C of the Form1040 that they file with the Internal Revenue Service.

When there is more than one member of a LLC, it is referred to as a partnership LLC. These businesses must file partnership tax returns using Form 1065, U.S. Return of Partnership Income. Since a LLC does not pay income taxes on its own, it avoids the double taxation that is a problem with corporations. Corporations pay taxes on their income, and shareholders also pay taxes when the company's profits are distributed to them in the form of dividends.

Most states have a registry where you can search to see if the business name you are considering is available and not in use by another registered company. One piece of advice: Do not use your surname as a part of the company's name. If something goes wrong down the road or you want to discontinue the business, you'll be glad your name isn't on the front door. 

Entrepreneur? (How to gain support for your idea.)

Words used in different ways seem to have a different response, though they have the same definition.  Here is the published definition:

Entrepreneur: a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.

It is interesting to mention that the synonym for entrepreneur is capitalist.  But, that is for another discussion.

Whether you are a start-up entrepreneur launching a new company or a corporate entrepreneur tasked with creating a new business unit, you can use these practical tips to obtain greater support and resources. These ideas capture the best practices that have helped entrepreneurs for start-ups and corporate ventures around the world, including most high tech innovators since the mid-‘80s, convince resource providers such as investors, board members, customers and suppliers.

1. Don’t just talk about your exciting business idea – explain why you’re launching it.

It’s normal: you want resource providers to support you, so you are eager to tell them what a great business opportunity you’re working on. But remember: they are actually evaluating whether to support YOU, not just the new business. Tell them honestly about the real reasons that lead you to take this potentially risky path in your career.

2. Highlight the commitment and sacrifices you’re making for the new business

A major red flag, especially for investors in new start-up ventures, is to find out that the entrepreneur is not risking any personal wealth to launch the business. In the corporate venturing context, a similar concern arises when the “Intrapreneur” (the leader of a new business unit) demands a generous salary increase and corporate perks before obtaining any results. These situations reflect unrealistic expectations regarding an entrepreneur’s commitment and willingness to take professional and personal risks.

3. Create a “virtuous cycle” of supporters.

When outsiders evaluate your new business proposal, they are eager to see that others have decided to support you, even if it’s just your family and friends. For example, if a friend has decided to invest in your new venture, be proud and feel free to mention it to others (with the friend’s permission, of course). It’s easier to convince people when they see that you’re not lonely in trying to get a new business started.

4. Prepare your venture pitch in two versions: one for industry experts, another for everyone else.

You must have heard about the importance of crafting a good venture pitch (or an “elevator pitch”) that will help to rapidly generate excitement about your venture proposal (typically, in 2 minutes). One of the difficulties in creating a good pitch is that industry experts expect to hear very specific aspects that differentiate your business from others in the same field, while others may not be aware of some basic facts related to the industry (especially if you’re in a specific technical field). Create different versions of your venture pitch for each of these audiences in order to maintain their interest throughout your conversation.

5. Before doing a formal presentation figure out how to neutralize the skeptics in the audience.

After pitching your venture several times, it’s likely that a resource provider will invite you to make a formal presentation about your new business. This is a good sign, and you must prepare carefully. Many entrepreneurs forget to prepare for a crucial aspect of the presentation, which is: who in your audience will be likely to raise many concerns about your project? In some situations, this is relatively easy to identify in advance. For example, when presenting a new corporate venture in industrial companies, the financial officers need a lot of convincing before they’ll authorize any funding. In banks, the risk departments tend to be the skeptic ones. When presenting a new start-up, investors with the greatest industry-specific expertise in your field require special attention. Know your audience and prepare for ways to address their concerns.

Post-Game Analysis in Business (The Art of the Autopsy)

You and your team proposed a project to a potential client. They shot it down. Everyone's feeling a little annoyed about it. So the last thing you want to do is relive that meeting play-by-play, right?  That is human nature. But if you have a tendency to tell everyone to just move on, not to worry and that you'll do better next time, you could be missing a huge opportunity.

In the sports world, coaches often make their teams watch footage of past games. They study what plays worked -- and which could work better with some tweaking. They figure out vulnerabilities. This post-game analysis is key to improving. It's expected as part of practice.

I have written before of how few people apply in work contexts, which is a shame, because application is one of the things that most successful individuals do at work, daily if they can. If one person is actively trying to get better at his/her job, and another is not, it's not hard to guess who will eventually do the job better.

One of the reasons people do not like to practice is that we do not like to dwell on our mistakes. That is understandable, and there are whole schools of thought claiming that managers should focus on people's strengths as a way to coax out better performance.

But even as you focus on people's strengths -- something post-game analysis can also reveal -- you can point out skills and habits that could become strengths with work. A brilliant but brusque person can learn to ask one or two personal questions – that is it, nothing crazy -- in order to appear human before meeting with other humans, and thus knock the ball out of the park more often. Someone prone to getting flustered can learn to pause and employ strategies for gaining time to think (like asking for clarification or someone else's opinion) before giving an answer.

You can also do post-game analysis after things that go right. Understanding why a meeting arrived at a great answer in a reasonable amount of time may help you stage more such meetings -- and that would be a beautiful thing.

Do you do post-game analysis in your line of work?  The importance of an autopsy after a defeat is to truly understand the reasons why.  As a medical examiner would determine the cause of death, you in turn shall explore the cause of defeat.

It is also extremely important to note that a defeat is only a temporary condition.  Also, it may prove that you had taken the very best effort to gain a contract and to go beyond logical financial necessity would have only lead to losses in profit and satisfying the existing customer base.

Treating each customer as your only customer

The chances of any one person getting hit by lightning are something like 0.01 percent, but as they say, if you happen to be the one who gets struck, those odds just went up to 100 percent. There's a business parallel to that bit of fun-with-numbers: One person may represent 0.01 percent of your customer base (or 5 percent or 20 percent), but when they are dealing with you it now becomes 100 percent of that population.

Of course, good people working for good customer service organizations always laser-focus on the individual with whom they are dealing at any given time (at least we hope so). But in the broader thinking of a company, it is typical to consider customers in the aggregate -- whether through policies and mottos like "we give our customers our best every day," or internal company policies like "all customers who claim they got defective units should be offered a refund or exchange."

In the normal course of business planning, marketing and operations, it's usually fine to think of customers collectively. But there are situations when it's better to think and behave as if you have only one.

The one-customer mindset will serve you especially well when there is a large-scale problem. Sooner or later, every business has an issue that affects a large portion -- if not all -- of its customers. Could be a service interruption, a defect or recall, extended stock outage, website glitch or a promotion that backfires. When that happens, the natural reaction of some people and organizations is to run around in a panic, like the sky is falling. I have personally fallen into that trap and found that this disaster-scenario mentality almost always leads to unnecessary (often extreme and disproportionate) stress and distraction, which in turn leads to muddled thinking, bad decisions and bad actions.

Now, when we have an issue that affects a significant number of customers (fortunately those problems are rare) I remind my colleagues, and myself, that if we dwell on the theoretical number of people who might be affected -- that is, thinking of our customers communally and the problem globally -- we'll just be freaking out until the issue is resolved. Imagining a room full of phones ringing, emails pinging and torch-carrying mobs at the gate isn't constructive. But if we remember that each customer only knows and cares about his or her own situation (the "100 percent" anecdote I began with), we are able to calm down and deal with manageable bites.

Instead of worrying that "everyone" is going to be upset, as if all of your customers are in a room together comparing notes, worry about that one customer being upset, because -- unless you're a high-visibility company in the middle of a class action or other PR nightmare -- that's usually the way your customers are thinking. Figuring out, whether philosophically or literally, how you'll handle that one customer will bring clarity and likely lead to the best, fastest and least stressful resolution for all involved.

To be clear, this may not change the inevitable scope or cost of a problem. But again, the individual customer neither knows nor cares about that. One-customer thinking averts panic, converts emotional energy to productive energy and creates the right mindset for coming up with the best solution. Figure out the best way to help your one customer, take care of them, repeat and extend to customers as your only client. You'll find that most of these things don't wind up being as bad as you think they will, and the sky usually won't fall.

Overcoming Fear… and Moving Forward

Fear is the most powerful single factor that deprives you of being able to achieve your full potential.  You experience it most often as a result of your own thoughts and emotional visions, rather than actual real world causes.  In other words, you become fearful of a fantasy – something that just does not exist.

Fear is a cloaked enemy that whispers negative thoughts into your mind, body and soul.  It tries to convince you that you will not succeed and that you cannot achieve your full potential.  These thoughts are deceptions.

The road you are traveling may be a bit scary at times, but do not lose faith.  Do not listen to your fears and the fears of those around you.  Don’t let old setbacks work their way into your present thinking.  And most of all, don’t give up on what’s important to you.

It’s fine to feel a bit uncomfortable.  It’s okay if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, or how much you can handle.  As long as you gradually step forward you will learn what you need to know.  You will let go of the scary things that ‘might happen’ and start to see all the great realities unfolding around you.

This is your life and it’s an open road.  Grab the wheel with both hands and keep steering yourself around all the unnecessary fears and uncertainties as they arise.  Here’s how…

Envision and declare what you want.

Regardless of fear or actual real world barriers, whenever you want to achieve something, you have to envision it and declare it.  You have to keep your eyes open and focused specifically on what you want.  It’s simply impossible to hit a target you haven’t declared, or get anywhere worthwhile with your eyes closed and your vision blurred.

The first step is realizing that what you want to achieve is already a big part of who you are.  You may be a novice just beginning a great journey, or you may be a veteran who hasn’t yet realized his/her dream.  Either way, the fact that you haven’t attained your desired result yet doesn’t make you any less of a force to be reckoned with.

In other words, if you want to run a marathon, you are a marathon runner.  You just need to run.  If you want to be a writer, you are a writer.  You just need to write.  It is only a matter of training, studying, and practicing.

Whatever it is you want to do, envision it and declare it out loud:  “I am going to _______.” 

And then start doing it.

Know the consequence staying where you are.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

It wouldn’t be.  Life is movement.  Inaction based on fear not only stops you from achieving, it stops you from living.

Your future depends on what you do today! The fear of failure, or whatever, can be daunting, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the realization of looking back on great opportunities you never took.  Don’t be satisfied with telling stories others have lived.  Write your own story, your way.

Believe.

What you believe either weakens you or makes you stronger.  If you want to give yourself the best gift you could ever receive, believe in yourself.

The foundation of the success you desire is not based on being in a certain place, at a certain level of achievement, or a combination of external factors; it is simply a mindset.  Success is an attitude that comes from powerful beliefs and empowering thoughts.  What you think and believe about your life directly determines how you feel, what actions you take, and what you ultimately achieve.

Believing takes practice, but it also makes the impossible possible.  Is it worth the effort?  Absolutely! 

Take it leisurely, but GO!

Yes, take a step, and another.  Keep going!  Achievement involves lots of doing.  What you achieve is based on what you believe AND what you act upon, not just what you believe.  You have got to take your beliefs and put persistent effort into them.

There is no progress without action.  What is not started today is never finished by tomorrow.  Some of the greatest ideas and dreams die young.  Why?  Because the genius behind the idea or dream fails to GO forward with it – they think about it, but never DO anything about it.

Just remember, no action always results in a 100% failure rate.  So get into action now and begin moving in the right direction.  After you get started every step thereafter gets easier and easier, until what once had seemed light years away is suddenly standing right in front of you.

Accept that failure is possible and necessary.

As Winston Churchill once said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Failure is necessary.  On the path toward success you may encounter many failures, but YOU are NOT a failure!  Failures are simply stepping stones that slowly uncover the correct path forward, one slippery step at a time.  You cannot get anywhere without these steps.

So don’t wake up at sixty years of age sighing over what you should have tried but didn’t because you were scared to fail.  Just do it and be willing to fail and learn along the way.  Very few people get it right on the first shot.  In fact, most people fail to get it right on the first twenty shots.  If what you did today didn’t turn out as you had hoped, tomorrow is a new opportunity to try again and build upon what you’ve learned.

And remember, in the end the greatest thing about your journey is not so much where you stand at any given time, as it is about what direction you’re moving…

Don’t be afraid of facing your fears.  They’re not as scary as you think, and they’re not here to stop you.  They’re here to let you know that what you want is worth fighting for.

What has fear stopped you from doing?  What’s one fear that you know is holding you back?  I would love to hear from you!

Yes, Women can and do make better leaders...

In decades of analyzing exceptional leadership, John Zenger and Joseph Folkman have identified 16 traits required for success. These include integrity, initiative, self-development, problem solving and a drive for results. Zenger and Folkman have made their names and their business by designing powerful tools to test for these qualities and to develop them in high potential executives. That's given them the data to analyze where the qualities are most likely to be found. With regards to the differences in effectiveness between male and female leaders, the results were striking: Women outscore men in leadership effectiveness.

Dr. Jack Zenger that this is due primarily to a change in leadership styles. Moving from a command-and-control style of leadership to a more collaborative model plays, he argues, to women's strengths. Women are better listeners, better at building relationships and more collaborative and that, he argues, makes them better adapted to the demands of modern leadership. For that reason, Zenger concludes, there is no good reason not to promote women.

Asked to explain, therefore, why women have not fared better in the corporate hierarchy, he is at somewhat of a loss. Thirty six percent of men say they want to be CEO, where only 18 percent of women say they do. Women have two jobs -- the notorious second shift at home -- while men, well, do not do quite so much. And Zenger thinks also that boards simply lack confidence in women. Few have ever seen a female CEO and do not recognize that, as Zenger says, women perform better. His message to corporate boards around the world is: Don't worry. Not only can women cope; they'll do better.

None of this is really new. But Zenger/Folkman's diagnostic tools are widely used and respected. They are driven by statistics, not an agenda. And one can't help but feel that even Zenger is a little surprised by his own findings. So the data is useful and important. The explanation of the data, however, leaves room for reflection. The last time I attended a corporate event on this topic, the senior partner of the firm sat through a number of presentations. At the end of the day, he came up to thank me but seemed full of frustration. "The problem is," he sighed, "we just can't get the women to change." On Zenger/Folkman's data, he should not want to.