Editor’s Note: Thought leader Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a noted executive coaching and management consultancy. Grace writes a regular column on Happiness & Leadership for WRAL TechWire. Grace’s core offerings are one-on-one coaching for CEOs and their leadership teams, and conducting strategic reviews for companies at a critical juncture. A TED speaker, she is hired to facilitate workshops on Personal Branding and Speaking Success and lead HappinessWork programs for companies and campuses.
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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – The start of the year is a good time to reflect on learnings from the prior 12 months and plan for the upcoming year. This is the formula to achieve desired goals. In my last column: It’s time for New Year’s resolutions – but here’s a better way to make changes, we talked about how resolutions are most often broken within a few weeks unless turned into goals with an associated step by step action plan.
Grace Ueng (Photo by Christer Berg)
Business Review, Key Issues, Plans
Fortune 500
When I graduated from business school, I embarked on a career in brand management at marketing leaders General Mills and Clorox. One of the many things I learned at these companies was how to conduct a thorough business review, define key issues, and then write a detailed plan. We would spend weeks in “Plans” – poring through reams of data and market research to understand the impact of trade and consumer promotions, couponing, new products, enhancements to existing products, advertising, size assortment, and more on volume and profit.
From this analysis, paired with our forecast for revenue and profitability, we defined our top 3 key issues to focus on in the coming year in order to meet our financial goals. We then worked closely with key partners including market research, promotions, advertising agency, R&D, and sales to piece together a step by step collaborative plan that would serve as our month to month blueprint for action.
Entrepreneurial Tech
In ensuing years, I took the rigor of the powerfully focused planning process from these two Fortune 500 brand leaders to a couple of technology start-ups where I led the marketing teams. This enabled us, even in a much faster paced and compressed time horizon, to have a clearly articulated roadmap to achieve the goals that my leadership team and our investors desired.
Boutique Consultancy
In running Savvy Growth, I conduct a similar process each year, thinking through what worked well and not so well with internal business processes and outreach, and then how we served our clients, what we did well, and what we can improve upon going forward. As a consultancy and coaching firm, our knowledge and thinking process is the value we offer our clients, so I also think about what we can do to continually stretch our growth and learning so we can in turn, do the same for our clients. Whether going back to Harvard Business School for my 30th reunion and taking in the lectures of Professor Amy Edmonson and Scott Snook on the topics of psychological safety and vulnerable leadership, reading books by leading researchers and business thinkers, or classes and retreats led by my positive psychology teacher, Tal Ben Shahar, all of these nourished my knowledge so that I can be a better coach and consultant.
Having the opportunity to work across industries on important business and organizational challenges for thoughtful and talented leaders is what keeps the work fulfilling.
2022 Year End Review: Plan for 2023
Last year, I wrote on many leadership areas which I believe are important for you to do well – I encourage you to pick up those that you think you or your company could improve upon and make improving each of these chosen areas a goal in 2023. Write a step by step plan on how you will improve in each area.
- Develop a culture of psychological safety in order to achieve greatness. If you want to create a fearless organization, here’s how discusses the key questions to assessing and building psychological safety in your organization.
Psychological safety is not a perk or a nice to have. It is essential in creating the passionate employee engagement that leads to the desire to build and innovate. While this safety is not the gas that fills the tank, it releases the brakes to help innovation to take hold and then accelerate.
- Know thyself well – this is the essence of leadership. I share highlights of Harvard Business School Professor Scott Snook’s last lecture where he shared with us 5 skills on how to increase our self awareness as well as The Counterintuitive Role of Vulnerability. What can you do this year to uncover your blind spots?
- Use your Time Most Wisely: Do only the things that only you can do. Are you as intentional about what you choose to take out of your life as to what you stuff in? When I begin a coaching engagement, I am often told by my client that they are challenged by the demands that so many people and projects place on their time.
Five takeaways for time effectiveness
In this column, I spell out the 5 takeaways from research on how CEOs use their time more effectively. Which of the 5 areas do you already have in place? Which can you improve upon?
1. Increase your Vulnerability, a critical leadership trait. In this column, we discuss the “Touchy Feely” course that 90% of the students at Stanford Graduate School of Business take and say it proved most helpful, decades later. In this interpersonal dynamics class, students learn the absolute importance of vulnerability, trust, and empathy in forming close knit relationships. Learn to share your failure openly. In Vulnerability is an attractive leadership trait, I share how years ago, I learned the hard way that I should share my failures. And now, I share very easily. Sharing vulnerably about oneself naturally builds trust between two people.
2. Increase your Confidence. Many extraordinarily capable and smart leaders I coach do not have the confidence levels that you would expect, so I partner with them to increase their self efficacy. Research shows that higher self-confidence and self-esteem predict a higher level of happiness. And the other way around is true as well.
3. Happy people are in better touch with themselves and their emotions and believe in themselves, and this connection can raise confidence levels. Success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence. Learn more: Confidence adds to happiness, and happiness adds to confidence – a virtuous cycle!
4. Ensure your team is mentally well and happy. Happiness is what leads to success, not the other way around. Those who read my launch column, know that I struggled with a depressive episode in the prior year and how I now help corporations invest in the mental well-being of their employees through Savvy’s HappinessWorks™programs. These clients know that the science of positive psychology and happiness works, but it doesn’t just happen. It takes work, ongoing work.
5. Research shows that to be a successful leader, you need to understand happiness and how to manage it – yours and those you lead. Most leaders learn this through the school of hard knocks…until now. With the expanding science of happiness, we can now learn how to be happy in order to be the best possible leader, and to make others happier as well. (2022 Happiness & Leadership columns).
I look forward to another year of engagement with you on topics of Happiness & Leadership and to collaborate on your progress.
About Grace Ueng
Grace is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their “why” are what clients value most.
Companies hire her firm for leadership coaching and strategy consulting as well as to facilitate HappinessWorks™ programs, infusing the happiness advantage into corporate culture, leading to higher productivity and results.
A marketing strategist, Grace held leadership roles at five high growth technology ventures that successfully exited through acquisition or IPO. She started her career at Bain & Company and then worked in brand management at Clorox and General Mills. She earned her undergraduate degree from MIT and MBA from Harvard Business School.
Grace and her partner, Rich Chleboski, accomplished cleantech veteran, develop and implement strategies to support the growth of impact-focused companies and then coach their leaders in carrying out their strategic plans. Their expertise spans all phases of the business from evaluation through growth and liquidity.
