Based in Silicon Valley, John Haag guides CallisterHaag as managing partner and provides a host of coordinated services designed to bring companies back to positive results. Transformation-focused, John Haag’s range of expertise includes financial restructuring and team performance optimization.
A recent Forbes article brought attention to a 2016 Deloitte survey in which only a small minority of companies reported that they were able to build effective global leaders. One fundamental issue was that psychological and tech tools were often deployed in situations that required solutions not based on behavioral psychology or tech parameters.
With analytics essential to boosting team performance, there are many situations in which the solution may require more intuitive, ground-level knowledge. For example, team motivation that should in theory be effective can fall flat when workers are too tired or spread too thin, and motivational strategies undertaken in these situations may be detrimental to the company as a whole, as stress-linked health issues take root. Assessing team readiness for initiatives often takes an experienced eye.
Another aspect of this involves setting in place the appropriate project sponsors, coaches, and mentors for given tasks. In this regard, experience counts: one McKinsey research paper found that leadership development programs that achieved objectives were several times more likely to involve the active participation of positive role models, in the form of senior leaders with extensive experience in their field. The upshot is that inspiring others and fostering talent requires in-the-trenches knowledge that a tech-driven system alone cannot provide.
