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)
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SAP (Systems-Applications-Programs) AG, a global provider of business software, has implemented coaching programs based on effective personal development accomplishing business goals while meeting the challenges of the coachee's professional role in an optimal way. SAP leadership has been following these prevailing coaching issues from:
After six years, the "leader as coach" pool in Germany comprises more than 70 internal part-time coaches (i.e. coaches who work as a coach besides their main role/activity) coming from all levels of hierarchy and functions.
The return on investment (ROI) of coaching can be enormous, especially in the context of project management. The following feedback may illustrate this point: "Coaching helped us prevent a potential project loss of at least Euros 100,000, because an excellent project lead found a way to manage tremendous task overload for almost a year."
Coaching is one of the fastest growing business phenomena in the world.
Coaching is increasingly used as a professional business tool and becoming ingrained into organizational life in various ways. The challenge for organizations is how to implement and optimize coaching successfully.
Many enterprises are not applying the management tools for the successful use of coaching in companies yet. In particular, the following five critical areas can be identified in the current poor coaching practice in many companies:
The 2013 Edition of "The Global Business Guide for the successful use of Coaching in Organizations" is available as paperback or ebook editions and provides a complete set of 7 effective management tools for the optimal design, implementation and optimization of coaching programs and confirms the implementation of coaching in organizations as a distinct discipline. This book addresses beginner, advanced as well as master levels regarding the use of coaching in companies. Wherever coaching is right now in your organization, the Global Business Guide will help you to take coaching to the next level.
A growing body of evidence shows that the ability to be smarter with ones feelings is tied to improved leadership, effectiveness, relationships, decision-making health and well-being; all of which help higher emotional intelligence (EQ) leaders create greater economic and societal value.
“EQ has quickly become a global movement that’s helping companies large and small rebuild trust internally to make its employees happier and more productive, which in turn impacts the overall ROI,” said Joshua Freedman, chief operating officer for Six Seconds and the chairman of NexusEQ, a global conference taking place this summer at Harvard. “We now know that these skills alone predict more than 50 percent of performance – which is more than can be said for IQ, or even for technical skills. Companies implementing EQ have stronger leaders and more committed employees, which turns into productivity, loyal customers and profit.”
EQ – Explained and In Practice
Just as the traditional idea of cognitive intelligence is measured by IQ, emotional intelligence tests create an EQ score. Though various working models of emotional intelligence exist, all recognize the importance of accurately assessing emotional data, then integrating and applying it effectively. The Six Seconds model of emotional intelligence structures these into a three-step process for putting EQ into action:
Awareness is “Know Yourself” – accurately assessing emotional data
Management is “Choose Yourself” – consciously selecting emotional response
Direction is “Give Yourself” – purposefully applying emotion toward significance
Among the benefits that organizations have reported:
EQ has twice the power of IQ to predict overall performance
High EQ salespeople at L’Oreal achieved $2.5 million more in sales
An EQ initiative at Sheraton helped increase the hotel chain’s market share by nearly 25 percent
The U.S. Air Force is using EQ to screen para-rescue jumpers to save $190 million
Higher EQ managers in a major restaurant chain created 34 percent greater annual profit growth
The seventh NexusEQ conference will take place at Harvard University from June 24-26, and will feature more than 80 experts sharing examples of how emotional intelligence is creating a positive impact around the world.
According to Freedman, the goal of the conference is to help leaders learn how to leverage the science and practice of emotional intelligence to improve prosperity and well-being in the workplace and community. More than 300 participants will have the opportunity to collaborate with some of the world’s best neuroscientists, authors and experts on emotion, learning and business to begin incorporating EQ into their lives and business practices.
Most of us have untapped talents that are tied to something unique in our makeup. Race, gender, physical factors, socioeconomic factors--anything that shapes us--all work together to define the talents that we either tap or fail to tap.
Extremely intelligent, well-educated men and women with master's degrees have a strong desire to succeed in their work but face unique organizational obstacles. For a variety of reasons, these professionals represent silent voices in their workplaces. They have come to be defined as "untapped talent"--professionals with relevant skills and abilities who aren't making the most of them.
Untapped talent comes in many different forms. Diversity, in other words, is quite diverse. Most people never hit their talent ceilings, and that reality isn't exclusive to any race or gender.
When a Person Lacks Access and Falls Far Shy of Potential
Access is one of the greatest nontangible levers to success. A single act of connecting with the right person who can provide you with the right information has changed many careers. Access raises the curtains to the rooms that are invisible to many but well-known by a select few--the power brokers in an organization.
Access Defined: Providing entry to an influential person(s) or being placed in a career situation that broadens your perspective and skill base.
One global leadership assessment conducted by a $35 billion corporation revealed that access, opportunity and development were the major factors that could increase the representation of women at its senior level. Like most global organizations, this one did well when it came to hiring and developing female professionals below the vice president level. Breaking through that wall where one became an officer of the company, however, was a very different story. Women represented 42 percent of the organization's workforce, but only 25 percent of its leaders who were a vice president or higher.
Navigating Untapped Talent
"The untapped mostly come from backgrounds that uniquely equip them with experiences that foster nontraditional thinking. When they draw on these experiences in a work environment, they offer fresh, innovative perspectives on organizational challenges. They become 'tapped talent,' and their passions and skills not only align but are applied to opportunities. Unlike the untapped, that are often invisible to many, the tapped are positioned to make an impact," says Dani Monroe, author of "Untapped Talent: Unleashing the Power of the Hidden Workforce."
Monroe's new book is organized in three sections. The first provides some foundation ideas about untapped talent and why it exists. The next section covers three specific areas where leaders can directly impact an organization by mining and refining talent. The third looks at three characteristics identified as essential in great leaders as it applies to untapped talent.
Our assumptions/beliefs are the elements we use to construct new ideas in our imagination, and they constrain us to what we readily accept and believe is possible. When these intangible assumptions/beliefs change, there is a corresponding effect that changes what we imagine and then in turn what we create.
Knowing who we are and what we are meant to do allows us to focus our energy and achieve sustained high performance. This is true for a person or for an organization and for each of the people who work there.
Being clear on the intangible elements of one's identity can build a strong foundation for greater self-awareness, purpose, well-being and building competencies in those areas that are important to you. Here are intangible elements defined:
•Assumptions/beliefs: A reality map formed through your collective reinforced experience. This would be a manifesto of the mental models you use and believe in to create your work and personal lives.
•Values/Aspirations: An attitude or world-view depicted by one word or one single concept observed through one's behavior. Values often influence people's choices about where to invest their energies. Please recognize that values change over time. Being "fair" means something different for a person at 44 than at 4 years old.
•Vision: A word picture of the future leading from now through near to far reality. You energize people to support your purpose or life signature with an overarching description of what you see.
•Guiding Principles: A universal operating standard that guides decision-making both personally and organizationally. Use guiding principles to align, create trust and walk the talk by putting everybody on the same playing field. Energy isn’t wasted in the politics of the team, organization or community because there aren't different rules for everybody.
Shifting Perspective
Shifting perspective is essential if you are going to get innovation right according to Seth Kahan, author of "Getting Innovation Right." Shifting perspective should put you in a new relationship to everything you thought you knew. From this new perspective, you'll find it easier to innovate successfully.
You must try to work your way around to seeing your business from"outside" perspectives. Seeing your enterprise as your clients and partners view it means understanding why they do business or join forces with you. If you do not know the why of their participation, you are severely handicapped when it comes to expanding the value they have come to rely on you to deliver. However, when you know what your clients and partners believe is most valuable, your innovation program is more effective.
When you see your operations from varying viewpoints, you sometimes spot opportunities to parlay what you are doing today into a new field altogether.
Viewing your world from a different angle requires getting out of your own way, questioning the assumptions that likely have aided your success up to this point. It is not an easy task, but it is a skill all leaders must master if they want to innovate and reach levels beyond their current success.
A Gallup Poll conducted last year gives credence to what many successful companies have known for years--engaged, involved workers impact a business' bottom line in a positive manner.
In 2012, Gallup looked at 49,928 businesses or work units and about 1.4 million employees in 49 industries in 34 countries. It found that "employee engagement is an important competitive differentiator for organizations" (Gallop Poll results: http://bit.ly/ZlPFPl).
Gallup's findings are the same across the board no matter what type of business and should serve as a reminder that employee well being is critical to company success, says Dr. Noelle Nelson, a career and workplace expert and author of "Make More Money By Making Your Employees Happy."
Gallup also found, in a separate study (http://bit.ly/Zwth1I), that regardless of the number of hours worked, weeks of vacation time or a company's flextime policy, engaged workers have a higher overall level of well being. Unengaged workers, even when given six or more weeks of vacation a year, still did not reach the same levels of well being of highly engaged workers. Well being translates directly into higher performance and productivity.
“Despite a continuing tough job market, a majority of employees claim to be getting approaches from other companies,” said Monika Morrow, Senior Vice President of Career Management at Right Management. According to the findings, 64% of survey participants said they were approached either directly or indirectly about a possible job offer over the past 12 months. Only 36% said they had not.
The latest findings are consistent with other Right Management workplace polls, noted Morrow. “Late last year a great majority of workers told us they were going to look for a new job in 2013, and more recently a similar majority admitted to cruising Internet job boards during work hours. So I think that’s the trend – that a lot of people are dissatisfied or bored with their current position.”
For what employers must do to keep and recruit employees, read "Turning Heads."
There is a difference between information and insights. Accessing good data is becoming easier, but reaching insights requires a genuine curiosity--a team must be interested and willing to tinker. Insight is what moves a team to action.
A team's goal is to figure out why data is behaving in a certain way. Good analytics bring data to life. The data needs to be pushed and pulled by different forces. The team's job is to understand the forces pushing the data so that insights can be gleaned and plans built.
Data has movement. It tells a story. A team has to figure out what the story is and why the story is being told.
Gut instinct is rarely arbitrary. Gut instinct is built on truth, experience, history and perspective--a composite of the person. The right composite leads to insight. Even intuition is based upon understanding how things should work or taking into account more than the traditional data set.
"TEAM Renaissance" is a simple model of a highly effective team. The book, "TEAM Renaissance: The Art, Science & Politics of Great Teams," is a collection of stories, specifics and immediate takeaways built around the Team Arch. Complementing the text, the Team Renaissance Survey is an interactive tool that assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a team.
Simply put, the biggest challenge most teams have in forming sharp insights is that they become complacent and stop looking beyond their own four walls. In essence, they lose perspective because they hear opinions from the outside less and less and are told what they want to hear more and more.
Instead, get comfortable with inviting fresh thoughts in. Listening for fresh thoughts is akin to reading a book, watching a play, or listening to music. Odds are that one of these fresh thoughts will be an insight. The better you get a pointing your awareness in the direction of freshness and the unknown, the more likely you will hear the insight when it arrives.
A deep and sharp insight into a problem permanently changes the way we look at it, and when we have a new perspective, a clear solution will present itself, often in days or even hours. Listening for insight is simply about being present and reflective. It's a very natural, maybe even our most natural, way of listening, but it can be awkward for many of us to empty the chatter in our heads and look instead for fresh thoughts.
Great basketball players like Bill Russell have an intrinsic understanding of the principles, rules, strategies, and mechanics of their game, but their play is dictated by what is required in the moment, often without conscious thought on the part of the players. The Art of Insight is the same way.
A sports analogy for finding the "sweet spot:' "It is the championship game. Your team has the basketball with fifteen seconds left on the clock, and you are down by a point. Do you want to be wound up and tight or loose and confident?"
Great players always want the ball in these situations, and they are always loose and confident--present in the situation, open to whatever happens, and able to integrate many hours of practice into the immediate unfolding of the game. Lesser players get tight and try too hard to find the "right" action to take. Their breathing gets labored, and neither their brains nor their muscles move with the fluidity necessary to make the shot. They get so locked up in "over-thinking" that we use the term choke to characterize their efforts.
Bill Russell, star center for basketball's legendary Boston Celtics, describes a quiet mind in a very fast setting:
"Every so often, a Celtics game would heat up so that it became more than a physical, or even a mental, game and would be magical. That feeling is very difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, even the referees.
At that special level, all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn't feel competitive--which is a miracle in itself. I'd be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut, and pass would be surprising--and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion.
During those spells, I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball into bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I'd want to shout to my teammates, "It's coming there!"--except that I knew everything would change if I did.
My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt than that I not only knew all of the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.
Sometimes the feeling would last all the way to the end of the game, and when that happened, I never cared who won. I can honestly say that those few times were the only ones when I did not care. I don't mean that I was a good sport about it--that I'd played my best and had nothing to be ashamed of. On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at the special level, I literally did not care who won. If we lost, I'd still be free and high as a sky hawk."
Obviously, a quiet mind does not necessarily mean that you are quiet. You might be mentally quiet but also very physically active, like Bill Russell operating "in the zone."
The Insight State of Mind doesn't include a lot of internal monologues. It is not a state where you stop thinking, but it is a state where you are not working hard on your thinking. Techniques aren't necessary to reach the Insight State of Mind. You simply pay attention to the presence or absence of the feeling you associate with your best state of mind. Although your proficiency may have fallen due to neglect, none of this is new. You must simply reacquaint yourself with this natural, inborn capacity.
An insight is a thought we've never had before. It's a fresh thought.
Insights are those "Aha! moments" when the clouds part and the solution to your problem arises right in front of you. They happen when fresh new light is spread on a subject you've considered for some time. We all have experienced these moments of deep understanding, even if we might not know what to call them or how to describe them.
An insight is a discovery or realization that goes beyond face value, beyond the obvious. It is a deeper, more universal understanding that is often very relevant to you. With insight, a new cognitive structure is formed that is different from the sum of its parts, and it usually calls for a different action.
While the circumstances in which people have their insights are as varied as the individuals, everyone has reported a common state of mind. It's an easy going, unpressured, open, and ungripped state. The more often you reside in this state of mind, the more often you will have insights.
Conversely, when you are agitated and bearing down with your thinking, insights become more elusive. While the Insight State of Mind is our natural, default state, we inadvertently think ourselves out of it.
A strategic insight is a simplifying "Aha! moment" that often radically redefines business and the competitive advantage. Once articulated, these strategic insights seemed like simple common sense to everyone. They are easily understood and acted upon. In fact, implementation usually occurs with far less effort than forced march that often characterizes strategy implementation.
The Art of Insight is a new book that teaches readers how to have more "Aha! moments" in life. Based on the authors' years of research, reflection, and experiences, The Art of Insight presents practical methods of recognizing and cultivating an Insight State of Mind. Charles Kiefer and Malcolm Constable describe these thinking methods that are designed to foster fresh thoughts and perspectives. But this is not a rigid set of rules--it's a creative pursuit.
"Cage-Busting Leadership" (Harvard Education Press) is of profound interest and value to school and district leaders, as well as everyone, with a stake in school improvement.
Author Frederick (Rick) M. Hess aptly describes his aims at the start of this provocative book: "I believe that two things are true. It is true, as would be reformers often argue, that statutes, polices, rules, regulations, contracts, and case law make it tougher than it should be for school and system leaders to drive improvement and lead. However, it is also the case that leaders have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed."
Own Your Beliefs
Cage-busting requires clarity on what you're trying to do and what you think a great school or school system looks like. Saying "Raise test scores" or "Make AYP" are bad responses here. They're bad because they're secondhand goals, defined for you by policy makers and test developers. A good response identifies the destination and lights a path forward. Knowing what you care about frees you to push back on the stuff that you don't think important.
Think Bang-for-the-Buck
Educators make a well-meaning mistake when they focus on academic outcomes without also focusing on cost-effectiveness of programs and personnel. The relationship of results to costs is sometimes referred to as ROI (return on investment), but it's fine to just think of it as the bang you're getting for each buck you spend.
Today, it's easy to find out how well a school or system is faring in terms of academic outcomes, but it's harder to gauge bang for the buck. Performance outcomes are generally discussed without much regard for whether they're achieved while spending 20 percent more or 20 percent less. Consequently, school and system leaders focus on boosting achievement but pay far less attention to cost-effectiveness.
Yet, getting the same achievement results for 10 percent less means a district is freeing up millions to add services or invest in programs, staff, and practices that can drive improvement.
