For Consultants and Coaches- Limited Offer
December 30, 2009
CD SET THAT WILL GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO LEARN THE EXECUTIVE TEAM ALIGNMENT PROCESS TRADEMARKED AS EXECUTAP™
NO STRINGS ATTACHED
ExecuTAP CD Set
We have a limited number of CD sets of the Executive Team Alignment Process Training (ExecuTAP™) in stock. Primarily, this set was meant for consultants and coaches who have completed the live training and wanted something to reinforce what they learned, but since we are no longer offering the training live, we are offering this out to the public at an 80% DISCOUNT from the original on-line price.
Now, while they last – Purchase the entire 14 CD set for $99!!!
The Three Abilities of an Awakening Leadership
August 4, 2009
Einstein has been quoted as saying that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”, and I have been gifted with the ability to reduce things to their simplest. I say gifted with the ability because it is not something that I purposely developed or strived for or even would have known to have as a goal. On the plus side, I sometimes can give a different and clearer view of an apparently thorny issue; on the negative side, sometimes people will hear what I have to say and it seems so obvious to them when they hear it than they say, “I already knew that.” I usually want to ask them, “Yes, yes, but did you know that you knew that?”
I wrote that first paragraph in order to establish at the outset that you probably already knew what I have written here about leadership, but perhaps you have not seen it organized the way I have done it, and perhaps you will see something in a new way. It is a challenging task, saying something about leadership that is new or different, as there are tens of thousands of books written on the subject and who knows how many articles.
Let me introduce what I call practical definitions, which in my lexicon means definitions that are useful in a particular context. A leader, at least in the context of organizations, is someone who can be counted on to create the future. What this means is that a leader interacts with his or her everyday life – the events, the circumstances– in a way that furthers or intends to further the movement in the direction that the entity which they are leading is going. In other words, whatever occurs, the leader uses it to move forward. It requires an awareness: an awareness in the present of what the future is that the entity has declared they are moving toward, as well as an awareness of the present – what is occurring, what thoughts he is having, and especially what he is saying. Those in a position of leadership have tremendous impact on the people around them, an impact caused by what they do, what they say, and even what they think. The leader has a moment-by-moment responsibility for the impact he is having, and this requires an acute awareness of external reality and his responses to it. In any given moment, he can either be furthering or hindering the enterprise’s possibility of success toward the future to which it aspires. Said another way, in any given moment he is either forwarding the vision or perpetuating the status quo.
So the first ability of a leader must be her ability to be aware. To be aware means to be awake, and most of us are asleep most of the time. In our habitual way of being, we are lost in our thoughts, in our emotions, in our evaluations about reality, in our fears. We are asleep to life! It is the old “stop to smell the roses” notion taken a step or two further. We are missing life, it is passing us by, but we are asleep to it. We think we are awake and then we suspect there is something we are missing but we cannot seem to be able to quite figure out what it is.
The leader, though, must be awake, as I have expressed. She must be awake enough to be able to see what is going on in her world and inside of her, and enough to then to be able to choose the future that she sees is possible. To be awake is not an absolute state, it is an unfolding, and so I am using the term Awakening Leadership to describe it, not awakened leadership. For a person to be an effective leader, then, they must be willing to be awake and awakening.
Often I am asked, “Does an effective leader need to be a visionary?”, and the answer is “no” if to be a visionary means you have to be able to envision new futures. The answer is “yes” if being a visionary means you have to be willing to be committed to accomplish a future and keep things moving in the direction of that future. Another practical definition: Vision is what you see in the future. To be a great leader, a person does not necessarily have to see it; one does have to be willing to be committed to it (and being able to see it certainly helps).
I had organized and was facilitating a two-day session with a client executive team, with the objective of their creating and aligning on a vision. The CEO came in at the starting time and announced that his father had passed away the night before, that he was going to the funeral and to take care of family matters, and that the session should go on without him and he would be committed and aligned to whatever they came up with. He left; we continued. When he returned the following week, he completely owned the vision that his team had articulated and became a brilliant and tenacious spokesperson for that vision, which, in fact, led to extraordinary success for that company. A great leader? You bet.
The second ability of a leader is to gain the alignment of the people around him. I am using the word alignment rather than the term buying in purposely. Alignment, in my practical definition of it, means ownership, which is more encompassing than just buying in. You own your house; you might buy into a vacation condo. It is obvious which one requires more of your commitment. As a leader, you do not want yes-persons or part-time owners; you do want people who are completely committed, as you are, to the fulfillment of wherever you say you are going as a company. To gain real alignment is a tricky accomplishment in most organizations: it takes authentic dialogue, straight talk, and trust. Tricky, but not impossible, and certainly worth the effort. Effective leaders will do what they need to do to gain it.
The third ability of a leader is to ensure that the organization has the intent, the resources, the structures, and the general wherewithal to be successful in its journey to the fulfillment of the vision. There are many aspects of this that need to be taken into account, and obviously the leader cannot do it all. He needs the energy and the willingness and the dedication of all management as well as the rest of the employees. Most importantly, he needs to be able to enable and ensure that the organization is equipped to focus on what needs to happen to be successful. For effective implementation, focus is everything.
As a summary, the leader is someone who is continuously creating the desired future: moment-by-moment making the choices to act in accordance with creating that future. She needs to be willing to be awake and awakening. She needs to gain the alignment of the people around her. And she needs to ensure that the organization can sustain focus over time.
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Business Turnaround
July 6, 2009
- Turnaround Your Business
Hunkering Up !
Over the last several months, as agreement with what the media has been saying has turned the state of the economy into a “fact” of life, I have been hearing more and more from business people that their present mode or strategy is to hunker down- in those words. At some point, I began asking people what that meant. And almost to a person, they physically demonstrate it by putting their head down, scrunching their shoulders closer together, and leaning forward. “You know”, they say, “keep your eyes on your business, watch how you spend money, do what you gotta do.” They don’t usually say it, but the next thing I would expect them to say and I think they mean is: “until it’s over”.
That finally led me to what I consider a very well-thought through and intelligent response: “What’re you, nuts?” The banks are teetering, nobody’s lending, whole industries are on the verge of collapse, the government is spending a trillion dollars or more to stimulate the economy, and people are going to keep their noses clean and see if they are going to survive for the next few years? Is that a strategy or a reaction? Is that the best they can do?
I looked up the term hunker down in my trusty Wiktionary. Hunker means to squat or crouch (get the picture?). Hunker down, an idiomatic phrase, means :
- To take shelter; to prepare oneself for some eventuality; to focus on a task.
- To stubbornly hold to a position.
Now, I don’t know about you, but does taking shelter sound like a good entrepreneurial, bold, leadership-like approach to a problem? Does preparing oneself for some eventuality sound like a take-charge, create your future, master your destiny declaration? Does focusing on a task evoke any confidence in someone’s ability to be the head of a company, large or small? And, come on, stubbornly holding to a position is an accusation of stupidity, not a strategy for moving ahead. It all seems to amount to sticking one’s head in the sand, but with a good justification for doing it.
I know this isn’t what people really meant to be saying. I know what they mean to be saying is that they are just going to be careful until things change. They are going to be smarter about what they do with their money. They are not going to take their existing customers for granted. They are going to keep focused on the important things to “weather the storm”. There are some good lessons and good wisdom in all of this, but is this all there is to being a leader in a difficult time? Most of the people I have had this conversation with have agreed that, when I put it that way, the answer to that question is a resounding ‘no’.
So I came up with the counter-phrase, hunkering up. To my way of thinking, hunkering up embraces all of the positive approaches as described above – be smart about money, value customers, keep focused – but it also opens one up to possibilities that may be found in the midst of this challenging period (if you know the joke, there’s a pony in their somewhere; if you don’t, never mind). The phrase evokes a completely different mental picture: one of not just possibility but of brightness; of looking out there, not just ‘in here’; of proactively taking advantage of the circumstances and emerging as a player, a winner; of demonstrating what you would want others to do if you really thought about it.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself or ask your team:
- What is the opportunity being presented to us in this? How could we use these circumstances to rise above the crowd? How can we emerge not just as a survivor but as a champion?
- There are people that are thriving because of these circumstances – why is that? What do they do or what are they doing that has them thrive? What can I/we learn from it? How could we take the same kind of advantage of what is going on?
- Imagine a future in which we had exceeded all expectations during the present circumstances. Actually imagine it, and then from that future ask, what did we do? How did we accomplish that?
- If we are looking up, and our competitors are looking down, what advantage could that be to us? What might we see up there? If we are proactive while our competitors are reactive, how might we thrive while they survive, at best? What might we do?
Winston Churchill said never, never , never give up. I might dare to add, never, never, never succumb. Never give up your vision. Never get resigned. Never fall asleep to the mass hypnotic trance of agreement on the way things are. This is the role of a leader. A leader says, “We are going here”, and then she or he stays true to that, and perseveres, no matter what. She says, “Oh, the economy sucks, does it?”, and then adds, “Well how do we use this to propel us to our future?” Hunkering down is to die a little; to no longer see the light that some desired future represents. Those who hunker up may or may not succeed – what worthy journey comes with a guarantee of success? – but who would you bet on? Those that turn in, or those that look out?
Which one do you choose to be?
