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February 29, 2016 Issue

The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information

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Global Leadership Development Firm Offering Full Service Leadership and Talent Development Services Including Executive Coaching, Change and Transition and Strategic Advisory Services

 

 

Matt Norquist

President & CEO

 

Linkage

www.linkageinc.com

 

Interview conducted by:

Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – February 29, 2016

 

CEOCFO: Mr. Norquist, the tagline on your site is Developing Leaders Worldwide. How does Linkage accomplish this?

Mr. Norquist: When you think about Linkage, we are a global leadership development firm. Much of our work is in partnership with clients, focused on meeting their core business objectives... I think that is the unique distinction. We work with organizations to craft solutions for their business to help their leaders create the greatest impact they can possibly create. That is really the burning question that we are trying to answer on a day to day basis; how can we help our clients and their leaders create meaningful impact; however they may measure impact in their worlds. There are three key areas of our business. The core service Linkage provides is tailored and customized leadership development solutions. We work with clients to determine a strategic solution to a specific leadership or business challenge that they are facing, and then we work with them to determine the right delivery method for the different populations inside of their businesses. Our second focus area is our leadership institutes which are immersive learning experiences that we consider more like ‘un’ conferences. These are large leadership development experiences that we host in locations around the world. We gather several hundred every day leaders; people like you and me. People who are running a division of Toyota or overseeing a region of McKesson and so on; real life leaders with every day challenges. We help them learn from the best thinkers in the world, and their peers about the latest thinking on leadership, development, crisis management and so on. The remaining business focus for Linkage is what I call executive coaching or strategic advisory services. This could be a CEO succession plan for a Fortune 1000 company: right now we are helping a company select between internal and external successors and will then be designing the ongoing leadership development plan for the winning candidate and likely a longer term leadership development solution for his/her teams. We also do executive coaching for mid-level employees within an organization: from division managers to chairmen of the board. Those are the key three ways that we develop leaders worldwide.

 

CEOCFO: What is the key to understanding a company so that you can help them?

Mr. Norquist: For us, the key is understanding what impact the company is trying to create, financially and in the world; what their “why” is and what is getting in their way of achieving their goals. Is it toxic leaders? Is it not having enough women and under-represented leaders advance through the ranks? Is it that they do not have enough or the right systems to identify and develop the best talent? Do they have overly robust processing systems that prevent them from seeing where the talent really lies in their organizations? It is about figuring out what their “why” is (their motivation for being) and what things are preventing them from getting there. We find that through a process of deep discovery, we can define the problem to inform the design of the solution.

 

CEOCFO: How does Linkage help put into place steps so that people do not forget what they have learned, whether it is in a seminar or through your intensive process?

Mr. Norquist: About thirty years ago our firm was founded in the pursuit of the question of what makes great leaders great, and what makes great leaders different. As we started talking to leaders and academics and clients; we solved more of the puzzle, yet the answers led us to more questions that we needed to answer. We formed Linkage with the purpose of connecting or linking the world’s best thinkers and smart practices with everyday leaders.

 

Linkage has engaged with roughly 1.5 million leaders over the last twenty five years: that’s a great case for learning for us! We talked with these leaders and we started to learn some interesting things about creating lasting leadership impact.

 

One is that a company has to believe and act like leadership development is essential, because if you are not advancing your leaders’ capacity to perform, to maximize potential and optimize effectiveness, they are trailing backwards, compared to the marketplace. Second is that we have learned that organizations need to create a cultural dynamic, where leaders make commitments and team members hold each other accountable. Third, is that we have found that leadership is affected by the external environment, the competition, company politics, position in the market, industry, and, on the inside; “the parents you pick.” I like to say that one of the best things we can all do if we want to be anything in life is pick the right parents. Of course, you have no control over that. Your big five personality themes extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience) your family role growing up, your interests and your ambitions.

 

If you want to make changes stick in an organization, you have got to consider both the inside and the outside game and work on both. One of the things that we have found is that to do that leaders have to get past the point of trying and into the act of training. This is key.

 

A classic example of this is when we are early in the year and everybody is still early into their New Year’s resolutions. I decide I am going to lose twenty pounds this year and I start going to the gym. I am committed to it and go in and I work out hard every day. I am sore the next day and I am measuring progress based on how much I sweat or how sore my muscles are, but guess what? I forgot to change my diet. I am eating the same crap that I did before, I cannot figure out why I am not making progress. Therefore, one of the things that we teach leaders is how to start developing habits and training so that they can make continuous progress and that they are measuring change based on progress versus effort. It is when we start measuring progress not effort that we start seeing change that sticks. In my experience, depending on how difficult the habit the leader is trying to develop, it takes anywhere from six to eight weeks to really start engraining that habit. Some leaders are faster. Some leaders are slower.

 

CEOCFO: Would you tell us about your global reach?

Mr. Norquist: Linkage has about two hundred consultants in about twenty countries around the world. We have presence in Europe, Brussels, Bucharest, Istanbul, Athens, Kuwait, Johannesburg and South America. We have several locations across the United States. Several in Asia. Our business is probably about two thirds domestic/North America, and about one third outside the US.

 

CEOCFO: How do you deal with the challenges of running an organization that is so widespread?

Mr. Norquist: By making sure that I am flexible. I am accessible all the time. As we grow that will become more difficult, so then it is about setting up systems that allow people who are not in my backyard to be able to make sound decisions on their own without calling me. For example, in Kuwait I have a colleague named Salwa Al-Sharqawi, she is the President of Linkage Middle East, and she runs our Kuwait office. She is just tremendous. For instance, she and I had a call this morning about a program that she is running, and I have a former client of mine who just moved to Kuwait and who wants to attend. I told him, “You can attend our program for free; just go meet with Salwa and talk about your business with her.” This is a person that I have personally known for fifteen years. If I did not have a tremendous resource in Salwa running our Kuwait business I would want to be much more involved in that conversation. I would say, “Make sure that I am on that conference call. Follow up with me afterward.” However, I trust Salwa and I know that she runs a sound business. So instead, I can take five minutes to brief each of them on the other and then let them connect directly. That is how I try to manage. I make sure that I have good people who can do the work and then follow up with me to make sure they are making the right progress.

 

CEOCFO: What are the intangibles that you look for in your people?

Mr. Norquist: Being in the leadership business, what I look for is deep, deep insight. I would even go so far as to say wisdom, deep insight and discernment. Folks who are able to take a situation and really think it over or look at it from all angles, from their own lens and from other peoples’ lenses and come up with something that is a searing observation and thought about what could be different. That shows up in conversation. It also shows up when you look at writing styles. I also look for people with voice; folks who have something to say and know how to say it, so that it comes out with executive presence or gravitas. The other thing that I look for is people who follow through. In our business, if you want to help leaders make change, you cannot just trust that they are going to make the change. You have got to follow up. In the business development part of our organization it sometimes takes five or even ten touch points to get someone to agree to a first meeting. I do not want team members who give up after the third try. I need people who follow through and stay with it. That tenacity is a big thing that I look for as well.

 

CEOCFO: How are you planning for that growth, where you might lose some of your personal communication?

Mr. Norquist: I am a believer in growing with our clients. For example, I find out that someone in Australia wants a program that looks like XYZ and I may suggest, “We would be glad to partner with you on this if you would like to be one of the founding sponsors, almost like an anchor tenant in our building there.” It is about growing where clients have needs rather than just building a “Field of Dreams,” or, “If you build it they will come” approach. Then there is keeping the connection; that part is not easy. Even in an organization of our size, I do not know all two hundred people deeply, personally, yet. Therefore, I try to connect with people in different formats. I do regular live communication with town hall type meetings. I use in-person and video approaches, depending on where my team is located. I systemically reach out to every one of our consultants each week and ask them questions about their client and project work. That takes surprisingly little time, even though we have many of them all around the world. Then there is walking the halls and reinforcing the same messages I send on email and in town halls. I make sure that I do this one on one with people in the office, because some people respond better to this type of communication. Then as we grow it probably means getting faster with technology. It may require more travel to markets where we have clusters. It involves making sure that everyone knows that they have access to me, because it is easy to take a quick phone call or email. It takes very little time and makes a big difference.

 

CEOCFO: How are your programs and ideas changing and evolving?

Mr. Norquist: Anyone in the leadership development space would be foolhardy not to acknowledge the role that technology either is playing or will soon be playing in the way we learn and the way we teach people. This is something that we are continually looking at--investment at new programs and new ways of doing things. Virtual programs and delivery are areas we are exploring and looking to take advantage of in how we scale and expand globally. The other that I believe is an untapped resource for many companies is how we can learn from our work with clients, and how we can learn from our peers. Connecting more clusters of companies and more clusters of leaders and related companies together, so that people can learn from their own experiences and those of the people around them; I think whoever formalizes and gets to that fastest will make a big dent in the marketplace. I believe that as the new generation comes up; and this can be my children’s generation and even the tail end of GenX and the millennials, a key is real time learning. I dream about having an app or a text-based coaching service so that a leader can be going into a big meeting and text his coach or even query an app about, “What is the best way to present this idea,” and get back a real time, either through artificial intelligence generated or an example of what someone else had done in a similar situation, or as a live answer from his or her personal coach. I think we are going to see more real time, just-in-time feedback become the norm in coaching. No one has cracked that yet! That is something that we are spending time and energy investigating at the moment.

 

CEOCFO: How do you help companies reach out or touch base with their lower level employees, the people on the front line, to understand what some of the challenges are, day to day, that people in management just tend to gloss over or not even consider?

Mr. Norquist: Our best approach is through teaching them how to do it versus doing it for them. Linkage doesn’t do as much work directly with team members who are below the senior manager level. For example, we are doing a project with a Fortune 500 organization right now that is moving a bunch of employees from one location to the other. We are trying to figure out A. why certain key talent is leaving and B. with key positions and roles and population segments; what would compel them to stay with the company and make this difficult and lengthy move. Therefore, we have been interviewing folks and talking to them and one of the big things that came out in interviews is people saying, “Thank you for taking the time to talk with me! No one has ever had this conversation with me before now!”

 

Therefore, we are now going to be rolling out a “listening program,” teaching their managers how to have tough, personal, inquisitive conversations about the factors that may affect a move and would help people to understand their worth or their value inside of the company. The worst thing that could happen for this company is for them to have a number of senior and emerging leaders quit when they are asked why and then hear them say, “No one asked me to stay. No one told me how important I was.” That happens all the time. So, we will work with them to help them to ask smart questions to understand the underlying reasons people are making their decisions, so that the company and/or the manager as an individual can create a more compelling vision of the future to engage their people.

 

CEOCFO: Why use Linkage?

Mr. Norquist: I would say that there are at least three reasons. One is because we deeply care about having impact with our clients. Our consultants care more than anyone else I have ever seen about the success of our clients. So many companies do not. So many companies just think about their billings, about their client list and moving on to the next project. Our people really care. Two, is that I think we are unique and our name suggests why. We are one of the only companies that links or connects the best thinkers across genres, industries, functions, peer groups. This includes academics, real-life practitioners, thought leaders and gurus; the best thinkers and smartest practices for every day leaders. We are not pedagogues or purveyors of a single perspective. We of course have our points of view on a bunch of things, but we do not have a certain way or questions you have got to use for an employee engagement survey. We do not care if you do the Q12 or the Q100 employee survey. We care about how you change your culture and improve the engagement and performance of your people. We are uniquely agnostic because of our roots in being a linker of people and ideas, not espousing just our own point of view, so that allows us to think about what is the right solution for a given client. Three: we have studied and worked with about as many leaders as any others in our space, at least in the last twenty or thirty years. I cannot think of many that have touched as many leaders as Linkage has. With that comes unique perspective and as previously mentioned, a wisdom and discernment on how to guide clients into making sound, strategic decisions.



 

“We formed Linkage with the purpose of connecting or linking the world’s best thinkers and smart practices with everyday leaders.” - Matt Norquist


 

Linkage

www.linkageinc.com

 

Contact:
Dana Yonchak

781-402-5688

dyonchak@linkageinc.com



 


 

 



 

 


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