For South African businessman Mark Lamberti, the pursuit of learning has been a driving force that helped propel him to the top of the professional ladder. Early on in his career, Lamberti recognized that education takes many forms. His formal studies were augmented by the life lessons he absorbed whilst taking on ever greater responsibilities in the corporate trenches. If leadership came naturally to Lamberti, it was likely because the choices he made were informed ones.
With his formidable education and decades of accumulated hands-on knowledge in leading successful corporations, Mark Lamberti is considered an expert in what works and what doesn’t in business. Keen observation and critical analysis, the key components of true learning, are skills that have served him well as a student, as a business executive, and now, in his roles as an advanced degree lecturer and leadership coach.
“In terms of the subject matter, again, I stay within my field of competence,” says Lamberti. “I have to have total familiarity with the practice and theory of what I’m talking about. But it’s generally around four things: strategy, leadership, human capital enhancement and organization design and development.”
Understanding Context to Establish Congruence and Maximize Performance
Mark Lamberti believes to flourish, CEOs must view the companies they lead as living, breathing entities. A business does not exist in a vacuum. Effective managers must be able to navigate the changing internal and external forces that impact their business. They need to have the agility to pivot to meet challenges as they arise and the flexibility to implement necessary corrections essential for continued momentum.
“Performance management is a continuous process of identifying, measuring, and developing the performance of individuals and teams and aligning performance with the strategic goals of the organization. [It’s] an ongoing process of setting goals and objectives, observing performance, talking about performance, and giving and receiving ongoing coaching and feedback,” wrote acclaimed American researcher, business professor, and author Herman Aguinis in his seminal textbook, Performance Management.
For a CEO to manage effectively, Mark Lamberti places huge emphasis on what he calls “leader context congruence.” Again, this is where observation and critical analysis are key. During his MBA candidate lectures, he routinely admonishes students that “context is everything, and if you read it wrong, you’re going to mess up… What worked for you in your last job or in your last company, or last year is not necessarily going to work this year because the context has changed. So, you need to be very clear on what the context is and [using] your capabilities as a leader, you must adjust your mindset to find congruence with that context. Because without that, you’re going to struggle.”
“[The process] requires managers to ensure employees’ activities and outputs are congruent with the organization’s goals, and consequently, help the organization gain a competitive advantage. [As a result,] performance management creates a direct link between employee and team performance and organizational goals, and makes the employees’ contribution to the organization explicit,” wrote Aguines.
Putting Success in Context By Prioritizing Performance Over the Bottom Line
When mentoring CEOs and members of high-level management with regard to achieving peak performance, Lamberti employs a signature “business logic model,” which is based on trying to help them understand that financial performance is not the first benchmark a successful company should be measured by. “Financial performance, he maintains, “is always, always, always a lagging indicator. It is preceded by operating performance, which is preceded by human performance, [and] that is preceded by the correct structure and staffing.”
Understanding the context in which a business operates means assigning indicating factors in their proper order. “That only becomes possible when you’ve got the right business model and all that predicates [having] the right strategy. So this model of strategy, business model structure and staffing, human performance, operating performance, and financial performance, gives you a kind of series of tags on which to hang any discussion related to a CEO’s job.”
Lamberti notes that in an ideal world, if you were starting from scratch, priorities could be set up sequentially, however, CEOs stepping into an existing role don’t have that luxury. “You could say, ‘[This] is my strategy, therefore, [this] is my business model, et cetera,’ but you very seldom have that,” explains Lamberti. “You are confronting going businesses, existing businesses, where some of these determinants of ultimate financial performance might be right and others might be wrong.
“What I try to get across is that unless you understand the sequence, interrelationship, and cause and effect of these cumulative precursors of financial performance and you manage to get excellence in each of them, you’re going to have a less than optimal business performance.”
Lamberti notes the problems he sees leaders most often confronted with center around driving and managing growth. “The imperative of every CEO is to try and grow the business,” he points out. But because no business exists in a vacuum, Lamberti maintains the leader not only needs to pick up on signals of change, they may have to set aside past success formulae and adapt policies and processes accordingly. “Sometimes they get it right despite themselves. Sometimes the environment helps them. But if a business does start to grow, it’s very important to recognize the kinds of things that were central to its [early success] — particularly if it’s an entrepreneurial founded business — those things change as it grows.”
As former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers warned attendees during an event at Harvard Business School’s executive education program for CEOs: “A decade or two ago, CEOs could be in their offices with spreadsheets, executing on strategy. Now, if you’re not out listening to the market and catching market transitions… if you’re not understanding that you need to constantly reinvent yourself every three to five years, you as a CEO will not survive.”
See more from Mark Lamberti: https://www.netnewsledger.com/2024/07/22/mark-lambertis-strategic-philanthropy-transforming-education-in-south-africa/
