Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog: Failure

Leadership

PERSONAL COACHING
Leadership onboarding coaching helps the executive adapt to the employer's culture, create rapport with their team and develop productive ways to achieve necessary goals.
SELF ASSESSMENT CENTER
Leadership skills and style testing. Know how you motivate and coach people to gain success at work and in life.
SELF-COACHING RESOURCES
Effective leaders keep up-to-date with effective self-coaching.
WHAT IS LEADERSHIP?
Leadership is an interactive conversation that pulls people toward becoming comfortable with the language of personal responsibility and commitment.
LEADERSHIP TIPS
“The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)

Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined

Many of us are focused on the wrong approach to reach our goals and improve our lives. We don't need to get more than what we already have. We just need to learn to use what we have.

There are four basic actions that people can take to strengthen their stretch:

Broaden experiences: When we get exposure to a variety of experiences, we learn about using resources in different ways and give ourselves permission to break convention.
Act without planning: Get going, impose constraints -- it fosters spontaneity and creativity.
Expectations: If we can learn to be more generous and expect the best, we create positive prophecies, which research has shown can make children higher achievers and employees more productive.
Unthinkable combinations: Mix things up to find previously unknown synergies. Many of the best inventions came about this way.

Some people and organizations succeed with so little, while others fail with so much in a new book STRETCH: Unlock the Power of Less.

Two mindsets drive how we work and lead businesses: "stretching" and "chasing." Stretchers embrace what they have, finding unconventional ways to use resources already at hand.

Source: Scott Sonenshein: Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less -and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined

February 14, 2017 in Books, Business Coaching, Career , Failure, Leadership, Memes, Self-Awareness, Skills, Success, Tips, What is, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Leading a Team may require Facing Pain

Courage is a mindset that requires grit and determination.

Most organizations have a list of core values that are displayed on the wall and show up in a variety of company marketing materials, from coffee mugs to baseball caps.

During orientation, many organizations train their new hires about their values and how to live them. And yet, on any number of occasions, you can see leaders acting in direct opposition of what they claim to be their values. These are often the same companies where two weeks after new-hire orientation, someone takes you to lunch and explains the real values of the organization. Or, if no one is looking out for you, you find out only after stepping on a cultural land mine.

What separates a good manager from an exceptional leader is explained in "The Courageous Leader," who is willing to face any challenge rather than avoid it. Making a difficult decision or change. Taking a stand. Having an emotionally-charged conversation. Giving and receiving feedback.

Accepting pain, author Angela Sebaly argues -- as opposed to avoiding that touchy conversation, indefinitely postponing making that tough decision or change or simply shirking other uncomfortable situations -- requires courage.

Values serve an important purpose for leaders. They provide a strategic road map for the vitally important to seemingly mundane everyday decisions. Unfortunately, not enough leaders consistently live their values through daily actions, which has a huge negative impact on teams, organizations, and communities.

Source: Angela Sebaly: The Courageous Leader: How to Face Any Challenge and Lead Your Team to Success

Can't Get Enough Leadership

John Agno: Develop Leadership Skills: A Reference Guide

Develop Leadership Skills: A Mobile Reference Guide

Ask the Coach

February 13, 2017 in Books, Business Coaching, Career , Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Communication, Ethics, Failure, Leadership, Self-Awareness, Skills, What is | Permalink | Comments (1)

Your Resistance to Change

Resisting change is normal. Perhaps up to 90% of the American people do not have a clue about change. Once you discover how significant change is in our lives is every day (and how an understanding of change can make you happier), we still resist change to some degree.

Whether the change is positive or negative, we know some pain is coming, and it is only natural that we try to avoid it. What we can do is influence our reactions to the emotions that all change will cause.

What is change?

Change is doing something different. Change is a feeling or emotion that is constantly going on around each human. We cannot change the emotions or feelings but we can control our response caused by change.

Positive and negative change causes the same emotions. Going through change always causes some form of pain. So no one really likes change.

Understanding change is not difficult. However, you must know how to control the feelings and emotions change always causes.

A working knowledge of change can make a person happier. It is a matter of not being blind-sided by the emotions and feelings of change on a twenty-four hour basis. The first step is to acknowledge we are having these feelings and emotions and where they are mostly coming from. Once we do that we can then combat these feelings and emotions.

Conquer Change and Win is an easy-to-read, fun book about the serious subject of change. This book will change your life for the better. It will lower your stress level.

Source: Jr., Ralph Masengill: Conquer Change and Win: An Easy-to-Read, Fun Book about the Serious Subject of Change

John Bielenberg: Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters

January 31, 2017 in Books, Career , Communication, Current Affairs, Failure, Health, Memes, Personal Coaching, Personal Life, Success, Tips, What is, Women, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Leadership through Thinking Wrong

Is it easy to think wrong?

No. At least not at first. And here's why.

Today, we might not stand trial for heresy as Galileo did, but we do stand trial. Every single day. We stand judged against the orthodoxy of what's acceptable. The mainstream, understood norms of how things are supposed to get done. What will work, what won't. We might be encouraged with pat phrases and told to think "outside the box" or "disrupt," but the fact is, humans loathe disruption. We love routine.

It's not all our fault. We're wired for it. The simple truth is our brains conspire against us.

We tend to return to the familiar, well-trodden paths in our brain--what is referred to as those long-established practices that control and bias the mind.

Meanwhile, the brilliant solution you seek most likely lives outside those normal pathways.

The authors of THINK WRONG developed hundreds of drills to put their practices in action. These drills give you counter-moves to the most common and tenacious biological and cultural challenges.

Consider the drills your recipe for thinking wrong.

Source: John Bielenberg: Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters

January 30, 2017 in Books, Business Coaching, Career , Failure, Leadership, Memes, Personal Coaching, Personal Life, Self-Awareness, Skills, Success, Tips, What is, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ego Free Leadership

At a time when workers feel a sense of disconnect with their jobs and companies--a September 2015 Gallup Poll recorded U.S. employee engagement levels at thirty one percent, with almost twenty percent of employees actively disengaged--it's vital that leaders of organizations be able to recognize how their own behaviors and egos might be contributing factors.

Asked to describe an ideal team or organizational culture, most employees will use words like supportive, transparent, authentic, collaborative, and trusting, yet when asked to describe their company's actual culture, they will use words such as competitive, political, territorial, untrusting, and conflict averse. If leaders know the culture they want, why do so many organizations struggle to create that environment?

Interpersonal conflicts are a fact of business whether they involve subordinates, peers, suppliers or boards of directors. Resolving those conflicts with a win-win mindset can unlock untold dividends in the form of a shared sense of purpose and commitment according to "EGO FREE LEADERSHIP: Ending the unconscious habits that hijack your business", by business executive Brandon Black and executive coach Shayne Hughes.

Black's case is not unique since "fish always sink at the head."

Once he resolved to acknowledge how his behavior was creating organizational dysfunction and took corrective measures, the impact on the company's performance was dramatic. Between 2009 and 2013, while many in his industry closed their doors during the Great Recession, Encore's revenues and profits increased 300%, operating cost declined 30%, and the stock price rose 1,200%.

EGO FREE LEADERSHIP provides an in-depth examination of the habits and beliefs that hold executives and their teams back and offers solutions to removing crippling ego dynamics.

Source: Brandon Black: Ego Free Leadership: Ending the Unconscious Habits that Hijack Your Business

Self-Coaching Books in ebook or paperback editions:

Can't Get Enough Leadership

Develop Leadership Skills: A Mobile Reference Guide

Ask the Coach

January 25, 2017 in Books, Career , Communication, Ethics, Failure, Leadership, Memes, Personal Coaching, Self-Awareness, Skills, Success, What is, Women, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

When in doubt, get out.

Why is Brookdale Senior Living Inc. in talks with suitors about a possible sale of part or all of the company, the nation's largest operator of senior living centers?

The talks are at an early stage and may not lead to a deal, people familiar with the matter said according to the January 11, 2017 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

However, its shares tumbled in the last couple of years with long-term debt and lease obligations of nearly $6 billion as of September. Shares have fallen from nearly $40 in 2015, surged 15% Tuesday to close at $14.80 after The Wall Street Journal reported on the deal talks.

Land and Buildings, a well-known real-estate investor that owns about 2% of Brookdale, said last month that the slumping stock price is evidence a new review is needed.

Why is that? Could it be that the Brookdale's business plan isn't working?

January 11, 2017 in Business Coaching, Current Affairs, Failure, Health, Real Estate, Tips, U.S. Stock Market, What is | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Search for Truth in Leadership

Over the course of 29 years as a professional coach, Mike Jay has been in search of the "truth" about development. Now, finally relieved after not finding it, Jay has entered into the age of post-truth!

Let him share briefly with you what he found while traveling, working and living around the "world of development." It’s called [email protected] (It was Behavioral Meta Dynamics but [email protected] seemed more user-friendly.)

Mike found "7" buckets leaders must get right to position themselves and people who are "led" by leaders into cognitive-friendly developmental environments, or to say it another way ― to allow people to be, do, have, become, and contribute meaningfully.

Those "7" DYNAMICS are:

Bias
Role
Level
Style
Capability
Values
System

Here's the bottom line:

"People have a right to be, do, have, become, and contribute, and they can't until they are."*

*[To borrow and augment a quote from Spiral Dynamics Inspirator Dr. Clare W. Graves]

It's up to leadership...to provide "cues, support, and scaffolding" for our natural process of development, to be nurtured... "to help people have lives." ― Mike heard Phil Crosby say across the dinner table one night.

[email protected] is a platform of tools for Postmodern Leadership, in post-truth conditions emerging from a VUCA-laden reality where anti-fragility and resilience are better than the "best-laid plans of mice and men."

To fill up those "7 buckets" we need "meaning-making" and lots of it generated by a process that has emerged, which Mike labeled DYNAMIC INQUIRY. It's a simple system arising from a Complex Interactive Process [CIP], that helps reveal where people are, and what's appropriately next for their development. While that's a mouthful, here’s another way to say it, "how we talk matters."

Mike teaches people, who have no prior knowledge of DYNAMIC INQUIRY, to start to use it strategically with a week of exposure.

Disclaimer: Making it an unconscious skill takes longer but brings with it side benefits of you guessed it... personal awareness, purpose, competence, well-being, and results!

To learn more about [email protected] and to register for Mike's COACH2 Skills Program: DYNAMIC INQUIRY ― a [email protected] prep course ― visit https://leaderwareatflow.com/2017p/5day/ .

Your First Leadership Job

The Doerr Institute for New Leaders

How to be the Leader

Building Your Leadership Brand

January 11, 2017 in Business Coaching, Communication, Current Affairs, Failure, Leadership, Memes, Personal Coaching, Self-Awareness, Skills, What is, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Is Ignorance Bliss?

Ignorance of our power isn't bliss at all, because this power works against us by default. If we're not aware of what it is and low to control it, we're in trouble.

But when we're aware of it, we can make sense of things and make changes. We can knock the lid off our perceived limitations and reach bigger and better goals.

This is where Automatic Influence can help, offering deep insights into the workings of human nature. When we understand how change happens and why, we can take control of the process. When we learn how to put the power to work, we discover how to take the controls instead of living by default. We learn a better and easier way to change.

Automatic Influence reveals a profound power source in human nature that energizes every emotion, drives every decision, and activates every action. When we try to change without triggering this power, change is hard. We grit our teeth, gut it out, lose steam, and give up.

But when we switch on this power, change is easier. Profoundly easier.

As author Erik Van Alstime explains, once we understand the source of our power, the next step is to direct it. What would our business and our life look like is we were free from fear? From everything inhibiting us and our teams?

Here are just some of the book's key advantages:

Reveals the secret of influence, and how to skyrocket our self-control and leadership.
Reveals the source of emotion and motivation, and why perceptual intelligence is much more powerful than emotional intelligence.
Helps us gain loyalty, coach people to be their best, and win friends.

Source: Erik Van Alstine: Automatic Influence: New Power for Change in Work and Life

October 27, 2016 in Books, Business Coaching, Career , Failure, Health, Leadership, Memes, Myths, Skills, Success, Tips, What is, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reinvention

Technology, globalization, economic shifts and geopolitical shocks have set in motion a continuous onslaught of radical, discontinuous change in the global business environment.

In fact, worldwide economic turmoil will most likely only increase in the future. Is it possible for existing businesses to survive, let alone thrive, in this turbulence?

Authors Shane Cragun and Kate Sweetman say "yes" -- as a leader you are prepared to look more inquisitively at the global shock waves that might impact your organizations and the people in them?

In Cragun and Sweetman's book, "Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption," the authors propose a simple formula, common principles, and set of tools for individuals and organizations facing disruptive and radical change.

"The ability to pivot quickly, profoundly, and effectively might be the most important core competency for individuals and organizations to acquire with hope to prosper in the new economy," says Cragun. "Leaders must change before they have to, and they must enable their organization to surf the incoming global shockwaves with intelligence, agility, strength, and command."

Reinvention uses compelling and eclectic stories and cases from around the globe over the past 100 years to reinforce key learnings. A reinvention evaluation can help you get a sense of your current need for substantial change in your organizational realm.

When talking about the organizational reinvention evaluation, this is a great opportunity to have your leadership team fill out a survey individually (in a leadership team meeting) and then see to what extent the team is unified in their responses.

Source: Shane Cragun: Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption

July 25, 2016 in Books, Business Coaching, Current Affairs, Failure, Leadership, Memes, Safety & Security, Skills, Success, Tips, What is, Work life | Permalink | Comments (0)

85% OF COMPANY SHORTFALLS ARE CAUSED BY INTERNAL BREAKDOWNS

A new report from Bain & Company, Barriers and Pathways to Sustainable Growth: Harnessing the Power of the Founder’s Mentality, finds that 85 percent of the barriers to profitable growth for the average company are internal and manageable – not external and uncontrollable, such as unfairly advantaged competitors, government regulations, inaccessible technologies and market conditions that do not offer growth opportunities.

For the largest companies, this number rises to 94 percent. Inability to overcome these internal factors will cause two out of every three companies to stall out, be acquired or disappear within the next 15 years.

These are the results of a five-year study across 8,000 global companies and discussions with executives in 40 countries about the key barriers that companies face today in the pursuit of sustained and profitable growth.

The research was led by Chris Zook and James Allen, who are the co-founders of Bain’s Strategy Practice and authors of several bestselling books, including their most recent, The Founder’s Mentality (Harvard Business Press, June 2016).

Self-Coaching Leadership Books in ebook or paperback editions: