Coach John G. Agno is your own cultural attache; keeping you abreast of what's effective in leadership. People learn better and are positively motivated when supported by regular coaching.
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.
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)
If you follow your passion and focus your talent, you are going to have a special "something" that defines you, that sets you head and shoulders above the crowd.
"When your greatest talent intersects with your greatest passion," says author Pat Williams, "you have discovered your sweet spot in life." It's the spot that will result in the greatest impact on the world.
Zig Ziglar once said, "You are the only person on earth who can use your ability."
The leadership skills of the manager may be the most important factor in achieving desired results.
There are many leadership styles, which can be boiled down to two distinct categories: the calm and collected and the loud and angry.
Both categories have strengths and weaknesses, and both can and do influence their subordinates to act. But without a doubt, the calm, collected leader more often than not prevails over the loud, angry leader.
Great leaders embrace the process of discovery by never giving up the quest for information. They control their destiny so that no one else controls it for them. They are never 100% satisfied, because there is always room for improvement.
To be an effective manager, you should know that people do better in a positive environment of acceptance and understanding.
He took over and they barely saw him. He didn’t walk around and get to know his team.
He didn’t know where their offices were. His office door was open, but he was never there when his managers stopped by. He made a cursory showing at a few official events, but he did not speak with anyone who worked for him. He was too busy chatting with the other vice presidents and the CEO.
On the surface, becoming a great leader appears relatively simple.
After all, we’ve all been told anyone can be a leader, that everyone is, in fact, a leader and that true leadership has nothing to do with authoritative title. Simple, right?
Wrong!
In “WHY LEADERS FAIL: And the 7 Prescriptions for Success” authors Peter B. Stark and Mary C. Kelly argue that the defining factor of a strong leader is rooted in the relationships he or she builds with followers and how effectively he or she propels the organization toward great achievement.
Stark and Kelly say, “If you’re willing to invest the time to read, learn, take a self-assessment, and practice these skills on the job, you will be proud of the results. You and your employees will accomplish more, and everyone will gain more enjoyment from working together.”
In recent years, trust in business has been battered.
The 2008 global financial crisis, a series of corporate scandals that have eroded organizational trust, including Volkswagen, BP and Enron, and an emphasis on transparency brought about by the combined impact of globalization, technology, and demographic changes have all combined to bring trust in business to what may be an all-time low.
Through self-assessments, insightful case studies from companies such as Ford Motor Company, Unilever, Eastman Kodak, practical tools and interviews with executives, readers of The Trusted Executive will find the tools they need to create a positive legacy for themselves as leaders and for the organizations they lead.
In “SUPERBOSSES: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent” author Sydney Finkelstein reveals how a select few visionaries in nearly every industry have mastered something most bosses miss---a path to extraordinary success founded on making other people successful.
If you study the top fifty leaders in any field, as many as one-third will have once worked for a superboss. Superbosses are the great coaches, the igniters of talent, and the teachers of leadership in most industries.
Superbosses customize their coaching to what each protégé really needs, and also are constant fountains of practical wisdom. Getting a superboss is one of the best ways to advance a successful career.
Being a superboss can fortify your network with long-term benefits for the future. And organizations who apply superboss principles are changing the rules of talent development and challenging false assumptions about retention.
When it comes to hiring, superbosses make their own rules. They forge their own path. They sniff out promising employees in the craziest of places. And the people they get are unlike any other: brilliant, creative—the raw material that may well be the stuff of future superstars.
Superbosses don’t want recruits who are very talented and smart; they want recruits who are unusually talented and startlingly smart. They don’t want ordinary leaders; they want drivers of change. They don’t want most-likely-to-succeed types; they want people who are prepared to transform the very definition of success.
"No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him." James Russell Lowell
Living an intentional life means taking control. It means planning. It means knowing what you want, where you want to go, and what you want to achieve.
It's also about knowing how to make yourself a better person, both personally and professionally. It's an ongoing, continuous process that's exciting and never ends.
We're all presented with turning points in our lives, often many of them. Knowing who you are and what you stand for is probably the biggest turning point you can make in your life. It's important to align your work and personal lives in developing your life strategy.
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is absolutely essential.
Blind spots exist in both our personal and professional life. The trick is to ensure that you have someone you trust checking your blind spots...to hold you accountable.
Pulling together a list of books, blogs, and podcasts that would be helpful to expose your blind spots and help you better understand your signature strengths.
There is a significant lack of development and advancement opportunities for high-professional talent.
High professionals are defined as deep subject-matter experts, such as scientists, researchers or software developers, who may not have aspirations to be organizational leaders.
In a September 2015 global survey of more than 700 executives, nearly three quarters of respondents (72 percent) said there was not a clear path for advancement for high professionals within their organizations. In addition, 78 percent said their organizations do not have development programs designed to help high professionals advance within their specific function, as opposed to including them in a broader high-potential programs that focus on developing the next generation of organizational managers.
“With the global economy becoming fiercely reliant on knowledge, technology, and innovation, many businesses today require highly specialized leaders,” said Korn Ferry Managing Principal Tim Vigue. “It’s critical for companies to find ways to develop, reward and advance people with deep levels of expertise, not just people with good leadership skills.
More than half of the survey respondents (55 percent) say their organizations do not have ways to encourage and reward high professionals, other than promoting them into formal management roles.
“Our survey found that companies that rely solely on promotions and raises for high professionals are missing the point,” said Korn Ferry Principal Consultant Marji Marcus. “We recommend initiatives that recognize the deep expertise these individuals have, and offer them opportunities to grow their contribution within their own functional areas.”
The survey found that nearly two-thirds of respondents (64 percent) say “being recognized as a subject matter expert” is what matters most to high professionals, followed by being able to build their professional skills at 25 percent. A raise (7 percent) and promotion (4 percent) barely made the list.
Nearly half (46 percent) said the organization’s lack of willingness to recognize the value of high professionals’ expertise is the number one reason high professionals would leave an organization, followed by a lack of advancement within their own functional areas, which was cited by 33 percent.
“Companies that depend on having a deep bench of expert talent to drive innovation and growth could find that pipeline depleted if they fail to provide alternative reward structures and technical career tracks for these high professionals,” said Vigue.
“The real key is providing the mechanisms that enable these experts to expand their contribution by transferring their knowledge to the next generation of experts - as informal coaches and mentors – without having to take on formal management roles,” said Marcus. “Otherwise companies run the critical risk of losing key institutional knowledge as experts retire or leave for another job.”
Self-awareness is the foundation of authenticity, and thus it is at the center of your compass. You develop it by exploring your life story. As you do this, you need to understand who you are at a deeper level. This is hard work but an essential step in your development as a leader. A foundation of self-awareness leads to self-acceptance and ultimately self-actualization so that you can fulfill your greatest potential.
Becoming Self-Aware by Balancing Intensity and Reflection
The charge to "Know Thyself" may be thousands of years old, but following this advice is not easy to do. As human beings, we have many aspects to our character. We are constantly evolving, as we test ourselves in the world, are influenced by it, and adapt to our environment--all to find our unique place. But you must be true to yourself to achieve what you seek from life and overcome the obstacles you face.
Self-awareness should be the starting point in every leader's development.
When Stanford Graduate School of Business asked its advisory council the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was nearly unanimous: self-awareness. It is the center of your inner compass and an essential component of knowing yourself, discerning your passions, and discovering the purpose of your leadership.
Without being aware of your vulnerabilities, fears, and longings, it is easy to go off the track. Gaining self-awareness begins with understanding your life story.
One of the most important skills leaders need to develop is the ability to see themselves as others see them. Honest feedback is often hard to get, because far too many people tell leaders what they want to hear. For this reason, authentic leaders have to seek out feedback.
"My way or the highway" partnerships don't work well. Yet, introvert and extrovert opposites working together can accomplish great things.
The sooner that introverts and extroverts learn about each other's thinking patterns and different languages, the quicker they can get to creative results.
With the blending of complementary talents of introverts and extroverts, by skillfully combining the extrovert set of signature talents with those of the introvert, you don't just get addition. You get exponential results.
When you bring them together and manage the blend, the entire picture comes into focus and suddenly you can act on things the way neither side could have separately. The possibilities for these two styles collaborating are great for those individuals, but also for their workplaces, including improved morale, surpassed company goals, and the high that comes from satisfying work.
As the extrovert polishes the bluntness, critical or condescending attitude of the introvert while the introvert begins to sensitively recognize the need for more warmth and tactful communication along with better team cooperation. The introvert's foresight of focusing on projects and his or her drive for perfection helps the extrovert become more clear about the important results they want to achieve and how best to verbalize them.
The Process of Opposites Process
Each of these steps is an essential component of a strong partnership:
1. Accept the Alien: You can't change your opposite, but you can understand him or her. Once you are able to accept this fact, you are in for much less stress.
2. Bring on the Battles: See disagreement as necessary to arriving at better outcomes because you challenge each other to come up with better solutions together than you would alone.
3. Cast the Character: Know each person's role in a scenario and cast them so that you bring out your opposite's best. Opposites share the credit no matter what role they take.
4. Destroy the Dislike: When you respect each other and act like friends, you can talk openly and have fun.
5. Each Can't Offer Everything: Know that each one of you is incapable of offering everything, so for true diversity, you work in concert to provide the widest range of options to others.
Today, for every success story about two opposites who make it work, there will be four or more opposites who crash and burn because they can't reconcile their different styles. However, by reading "The Genius of Opposites" and putting these five steps in place the odds of success will be much greater.
Because when we are unaware, we unconsciously engage our default behavior. Only when we become aware of who we are and how others see us are we able to change our behavior.
Sometimes, just being aware, allows the problem to solve us--rather than requiring us to solve the problem.
As a young entrepreneur just starting out, you may have a great product you wish to retail, or a service you wish to provide. Renting a nice office suite, or a retail unit in a busy shopping mall, will help establish a local presence very quickly. Unfortunately, you also have the expense of rent and rate payments, power costs, and staff wages.
Starting online can provide you with an immediate world-wide customer base with the minimum of outlay. Many online businesses start off in the owner’s front room, with stock stored in garage, shed, or the bedroom.
Online businesses tend to fall into one of two categories, selling products or services to the general public, or providing technical assistance to other online businesses.
Online Retailer
As an online retailer, your prime consideration is having a website for potential customers to visit, pick their products, pay for them, and get them delivered. To this end, unless you are very web-savvy, contracting the services of a good website builder is the first thing required.
The website needs building, plug-ins added for shopping carts and email contact, search engine optimization (SEO) needs to be formulated, along with content marketing, and social media exposure, and all need updating on a regular basis. While you’re busy dealing with customer purchases, getting them delivered, and sorting out customer queries; your retained website management team will deal with keeping your site at the top of the search engine pages. Staff requirements in the early days, should be minimal.
Online Services to Businesses
As a business offering web building services to other online businesses, the situation could be somewhat different. Unless you are capable of providing all website services yourself, then employing specialists in the different areas is a must. Programmers, SEO specialists, content marketers and blog post and article writers, are all required to work as a unit if problems with sites you manage are to be avoided.
As your business grows, then greater numbers of staff will be required. Whether they are delivery drivers, packagers, extra personnel to deal with emails, or greater numbers of software engineers, they all become part of the team. Keeping them focused, happy to work, and feeling they are part of the business, is your job.
In this digital age, bosses are becoming younger. The old style boss, sitting in his office all day, issuing orders and checking the accounts, is becoming a thing of the past.
Nowadays it’s all about interaction between management and staff. Arrange to have brainstorming sessions. Discuss the way forward, what’s not working, and how to put it right. Organize team building exercises such as paint-balling. Take your staff on adventure days, where for instance, working as a team they have to build a bridge over a chasm against the clock.
While all must accept the boss is the boss, working with your staff, making them feel they are an integral part of your growing business, is the best way to ensure maximum productivity, from a happy and contented workforce.
