[From CCL’s description of the book]:An essential book on leadership development and coaching, Compass is the go-to reference to help you—and the people you develop—provide the leadership needed in any circumstance to galvanize teams, groups and entire organizations. It is ideal for leaders and managers looking to develop competency in themselves and others. A vital guide for training and development professionals—both inside an organization and external consultants— use Compass as a coaching tool and a blueprint for leader development plans.
Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) is a top-ranked, world-renowned leadership development provider. It has nearly 50 years of experience working with tens of thousands of organizations in more than 160 countries across 6 continents, helping more than a million leaders at all levels.
Compass: Your Guide for Leadership Development and Coaching (Scisco, Biech, & Hallenbeck, 2017) is similar to FYI: For Your Improvement: A Development and Coaching Guide (Lombardo & Eichinger, 2009). Both are coaching & development guides. However, beyond the fact that both books left in blank chapters as placeholders because “those numbers are reserved for future editions” (2017, p. vi), the similarities end there.
A major difference and one that I really appreciate is how CCL’s Compass titles and groups the various sections versus how Korn & Ferry’s FYI titles and groups theirs.
The major sections in FYI (5th ed.) include:
Unskilled – The “before picture” shows where you stand against the target.
Skilled – The “after picture” gives you a target of what success looks like when a competency or skill is done well.
Overused Skill – The possible negative consequences of using a skill too much or with too much force.
Some Causes – Common reasons why people struggle with this particular leadership competency
The Map – Why the competency is important.
Some Remedies – 10 tips/remedies for building the competency.
Some Develop-in-Place Assignments – Job tasks that require application of certain competencies. There’s almost always a develop-in-place assignment that you can select in your current job to address your development need.
The major sections in Compass are:
Overview – Provides context to why the competency is important, what effects its mastery can produce, and the consequences of not developing the competency.
Leadership in Action – Tells a story drawn from real-life accounts of leaders displaying their skill in the competency area.
What High Performance Looks Like – Lists descriptive words and phrases for how leaders appear to others when performing the competency well.
What’s in Your Way? – Presents common obstacles to development.
Coach Yourself – Poses reflective questions designed to spur thinking about the areas of focus in which the competency can be developed
Improve Now – Are quick changes” for developing skills.
Developmental Opportunities – Tactics and suggestions for developing skills.
In Compass, each competency starts off on a positive note with the “What High Performance Looks Like” section (leaders who are skilled in this competency will do these things). FYI, on the other hand, starts off negatively by drawing the reader’s attention to the top section in each competency called, “Unskilled” (leaders who are unskilled in this competency will do these things).
I find it much more helpful to know the positive skills & behaviors (in Compass) I should be striving for in order to improve myself rather than see a long list of undesired behaviors & skills (in FYI) that I should be avoiding.
Compass offers a lot of content (that’s well-organized and more interesting to read than FYI) for each competency chapter. I especially like the “What High Performance Looks Like” section, the “What’s in Your Way?” section, the “Coach Yourself” section, and the “Improve Now” section.
Compass is divided into four parts:
The Fundamental Four: CCL believes that there are four competencies every leader needs to develop – communication, influence, learning agility, and self-awareness.
Competencies for Impact and Achievement: These are 48 additional competencies derived from CCL research and practice.
Career Derailers: Five career derailers that CCL research has identified as damaging to careers and what you can do to avoid derailing your career.
What’s Next: Is a guide to setting development goals based on a CCL approach.
Whereas FYI is written and reads like a series of “lists,” Compass is written in a narrative style and reads more like a short blog post or article for each competency, making it much more interesting and easier to digest and recall. I gave a hard copy of the FYI book (a 3rd edition) to a good friend of mine, but never told him to “read” it, only to use it as a reference guide whenever he needs it (either for his own development or the development of his team). For CCL’s Compass book, I would highly recommend that you actually sit down and read through the competency chapters.
Korn & Ferry’s FYI (5th edition), features 67 Competencies*, 19 Career Stallers* and Stoppers, and 7 Global Focus Areas.
CCL’s Compass contains 52 Competencies and 5 Career Derailers.
Interesting factoid: Mike Lombardo worked at the Center for Creative Leadership for 15 years. Lombardo collaborated with Bob Eichinger and Morgan McCall on the book, Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job. Lombardo and Eichinger later started their own consulting firm, Lominger (which produced the FYI book). Lominger was later acquired by Korn & Ferry.
*Both the Competencies and the Career Stallers & Stoppers used in the FYI book came, in part, from studies at the Center for Creative Leadership (Lombardo & Eichinger, 2009).
For a comparison, I selected the decision making competency. Compass calls it “decision making” while FYI labels it “decision quality.” In the overview section of the competency on decision making, Compass offers a nice overview and links it to Captain “Sully” Sullenberger and the 208-second decision-making process he took to safely land the disabled US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River. In the “Leadership in Action” section, Compass provides a more detailed account of what happened to Flight 1549 that led to Captain Sullenberger’s quick and decisive decision making on January 15, 2009.
In the “What High Performance Looks Like” section of Compass, descriptions for how a leader appear to others when performing the decision making competency well include:
Leaders who make their decisions using sound judgment:
grasp the crux of an issue despite having ambiguous information
accurately differentiate between important and unimportant issues
are quick learners
can quickly set priorities
have the courage to make decisions without full information
In the “What’s in Your Way?” section, Scisco, Biech, and Hallenbeck (2017) write:
“Leaders who don’t base their decisions on sound judgment put themselves, their teams, and possibly their organizations at risk. Those negative outcomes are even more likely when a leader’s judgement is compromised by a weak ethical stance or when a leader simply lacks the courage to decide to act–even without complete information” (p. 162).
Review the following list and note the items that you believe might be holding you back from becoming a better decision maker (Scisco, Biech, & Hallenbeck, 2017, p. 162):
You don’t like to ask for input from others but prefer to go it alone.
You fall prey to “analysis paralysis”–incessantly poring over information and approaches without making progress.
You value complicated solutions over simple, elegant ones.
You’re uncomfortable with ambiguity and anxious about making decisions without full information.
Once you’ve made a decision, you insist it’s the right one even in the face of contrary evidence.
In the “Coach Yourself” section of Compass, Scisco, Biech, and Hallenbeck (2017) advise asking yourself these questions:
“Do you make decisions quickly or do you delay for fear of getting it wrong?”
“How comfortable are you in ambiguous situations?”
“How do you react in a crisis?”
Another competency that both Compass and FYI share is Interpersonal Savvy.
In examining the Interpersonal Savvy competency chapter in FYI, I saw a laundry list of questions and advice that sounded more like a lecture. The exception is “The Map” section which offers a nice write-up of each competency. In my opinion, two of the biggest weaknesses of the FYI book are: (1) There’s a lack of a narrative writing style (like in “The Map” section) and often the writing is rather choppy, and (2) The recommendations (called “Remedies”) are overly repetitive. (e.g., “Be a better listener. Interpersonally skilled people are very good at listening. They listen to understand and take in information to select their response. They listen without interrupting.”).
Contrast this with the Compass book. In the Interpersonal Savvy competency chapter, listen is mentioned just twice (under What High Performance Looks Like – “listen well” and under What’s in Your Way – “you prefer to talk rather than listen”).
In the overview section of the Interpersonal Savvy competency in Compass, the authors write:
“You might have great ideas and be highly accomplished, but if you struggle to connect with other people you won’t be successful leading them. You need interpersonal skills to recognize and assess what others need. These skills involve not only listening to others, but also include noticing social cues that communicate how others are thinking and feeling, even if they don’t say so outright” (Scisco, Biech, & Hallenbeck, 2017, p. 261).
In the “What’s in Your Way?” section of the Interpersonal Savvy competency, Scisco, Biech, and Hallenbeck (2017) write:
“If you struggle to develop interpersonal savvy, you might not pick up on cues to how others are thinking and feeling until small misunderstandings grow into problems and conflicts. Others may not feel personally connected to you and may avoid coming to you with issues or may hesitate to give you helpful feedback” (p. 263).
Here’s what a competency chapter looks like in Compass. Note: I took screenshots of the Learning Agility competency chapter in a Google Books preview since I couldn’t get a good photo without bending and/or breaking the spine of my hard copy.
Summary: I never thought I would say this, but I have just found a worthy successor to my FYI book! Backed by research and practice from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), a top-ranked, world-renowned provider of leadership development, Compass: Your Guide for Leadership Development and Coaching is an incredibly useful and instantly actionable book. If you are an individual contributor, a leader or manager, or a consultant or coach, you will find the “What High Performance Looks Like” section, the “What’s in Your Way?” section, the “Coach Yourself” section, and the “Improve Now” section to be especially relevant to helping you determine the skills you need to improve or the skills you want to develop in others. The layout and design, along with the decent font size and use of icons, make reading and locating information in the Compass book effortless. Finally, the real-life stories of leaders demonstrating their skills in one of the competency areas (in the “Leadership in Action” section) make Compass truly enjoyable to read!
Written By: Steve Nguyen, Ph.D. Organizational & Leadership Development Leader
References
Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (2009). FYI: For Your Improvement: A Guide for Development and Coaching (5th ed.). Minneapolis, MN: Lominger International.
Scisco, P., Biech, E., & Hallenbeck, G. (2017). Compass: Your Guide for Leadership Development and Coaching. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership Press.
Disclosure: I purchased a hard copy of Compass: Your Guide for Leadership Development and Coaching on my own.
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