A Blog about Leadership
What do you think of our State’s executive leadership?
In January, Sonoma State University will launch a new Executive MBA program. The first course in the program is on executive leadership. As the professor for this class, I am looking for local examples of leadership to illustrate how to effectively deliver organizational results. Should I use the leadership of California as a case study?
Let’s take a look at the results. Leading an enterprise is a complex endeavor in which multiple measures of success are appropriate, including financial indicators, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. What kind of outcomes have California’s leaders served up? Our state deficit is
$26.3 billion; last week Fitch Ratings downgraded the state’s bond rating to BBB, just above junk status. In a recently completed statewide Field Poll only 14% of the state’s registered voters now approve of the job that the state legislature is doing, while three out of four (74%) disapprove. This is the poorest rating of the state legislature ever recorded by The Field Poll in trend measures dating back to the early 1980s. In addition, just one in three voters (33%) approve of the job Schwarzenegger is doing, also a new low. With respect to employee engagement, I have not seen recent data, but perhaps I can survey some of the 235,000 state employees on one of their furlough days.
We teach our executive students that the path to leadership success involves the right mix of business/technical skills, leadership intelligence, and execution competence. In our state leaders we have seen poor public administration skills, a complete lack of collaboration, and absolutely no ability to execute and get things done.
Perhaps the simplest way to view leadership success is in terms of stakeholder loyalty. In business, one measure of stakeholder loyalty is the Net Promoter Score. This is a simple calculation based on the question:
“On a scale of 0 (low) to 10 (high) how likely are you to recommend [your company, product, service, people, etc.] to a friend or colleague?” So I ask you – How likely are you to recommend California’s State leadership to a friend or colleague?
To reframe your last question…How likely are you to recommend California’s State leadership to YOURSELF??? In other words, how likely are these “leaders” to be re-elected? Very likely (except any term-limited governor). So what does that mean? “Them’s all bums…except for the one I always vote for!!
by STEVE BALOMBINI