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)
"It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are." Roy Disney
We say that time management is a symptom because there is an underlying problem.
Not paying attention to your intentions is the problem. Articulating our implicit assumptions is critical to becoming aware of our inherited purpose. Looking back in our life to those life-defining moments gives us plenty of clues on how to discover our life purpose.
Being clear on your intangible assumptions allows you to engineer a dynamic equilibrium where all the parts of your life work synergistically in a highly interrelated whole. Here are the intangibles that form the foundation of a strategic time management action plan:
We all make assumptions and hold strong beliefs. Recognize that these assumptions and beliefs are continuously reinforced through our experiences. These are the mental models we use to create our work and personal lives.
Our values and guiding principles depict our world-view. These values and principles are easily observed by others 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 54 than someone at 14. A guiding principle is a universal operating standard that guides decision-making both personally and organizationally.
The world's population will likely grow to 10 billion people by the end to the century, and their energy requirements will grow much, much faster. Today two-thirds of all people are still poor and consume little energy. As they approach a Western standard of living, they're going to want more than they have now of the things you and I take for granted.
Improvements in the efficiency of renewable or sustainable energy, mainly solar and wind, will likely become economical. But in the foreseeable future, there is no remotely practical substitute for the high-density energy of fossil fuels.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states, in essence, that without continual energy, all systems wind down. The Second Law is always there, grinding away. And over the coming generation, the companies and countries that control fossil fuels are going to have more influence on the rest of the world than they ever had before.
Energy is what makes the world go round.
For most of the past 60 years, the United States has prospered, largely because it has dominated the energy market but also because it issues the currency in which energy and other resources are traded. However, U.S. strength has been ebbing in the "Colder War" as Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin positions himself for the final push. While the United States dithers over green energy, Russia has a Putin in its tank.
Today, Russia and China are encouraging the abandonment of the dollar by developing international trade facilities that operate without touching U.S. currency.
Other countries are following the lead given by Russia and China. Also the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) took a huge step toward autonomy at an economic summit in Fortaleza, Brazil in July 2014. What currencies will be involved are not yet known, but these five countries are clearly moving to disengage from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)--both of which are subject to the dollar's current dominion.
Those unhappy with U.S. over involvement in world affairs are inspired to discover ways to escape dependence on the dollar. The United States intended to demonstrate to the world that it still carried the biggest stick. Instead, it has shown that getting whacked with the stick needn't hurt that much. U.S. sanctions against Russia for its involvement in Ukraine are having the same perverse effect on the dollar as sanctions against Iran.
Putin and his allies are embarked on a mission to sabotage the petrodollar. You now know this, and you know its importance.
Three factors argue persuasively that the undoing of the dollar will be comparatively abrupt and disturbing.
First, in its heyday, Britain ruled a vastly different world. Today, there are multiple centers of financial power--including Russia, China and Brazil--with the technical ability to build dollar-less systems.
Second, ubiquitous computing capacity will make it easier to leave the dollar.
Third, the volume of the assets that will be shunned will be unprecedented. The United States slipped away from the gold discipline in 1971. Since then, exporting dollars and dollar-denominated IOUs has been a major industry. The volume of dollar assets that foreigners will be shifting away from will be much bigger and will move like a landslide.
For the United States, self-restraint hasn't been part of the program, and now, reasonably or not, the world is full of resentment. As the need for U.S. currency declines, the resentful will find dumping the dollar entirely agreeable, a satisfying exercise in passive aggression.
Expect more conflict between Russia and the West. And expect the conflict to make access to energy and other resources even more valuable than it is today. Understanding that fact is the key to profiting from Putin's vision.
"No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him." James Russell Lowell
Many believe that we are all spiritually driven. But that energy can be dissipated if our actions are scattered and we feel pulled in various directions. Once we know who we are and what we're meant to do, we have new-found energy that pulls us forward. When we don't know, we feel that we are spinning our wheels, we're tired and not accomplishing much.
Defining our life signaturebegins by tracing our talents back over the years. There is a growing percentage of people thinking about the meaning of their life. This genuine spiritual concern is broader than traditional views of religion practiced in numerous countries of the world. Yet, it is unclear to most how to live their life in a meaningful way.
Change takes practice. It is very hard to bring about significant change in behavior. Powerful counter-vailing forces appear when we attempt to engineer positive change alone. Although you can do it on your own, a mentor or coach will help to more quickly navigate the hunt toward discovering your life signature. You will be required to make a commitment to staying focused and being prepared.
Let your life signature be your guide. Once discovered, you will know where and how to leverage your time and talents.
Know what is important. Spending time on what's important adjusts your focus toward potentially positive outcomes, instead of negative ones. By knowing who you areand what you are meant to do, you don't waste time tolerating what's not important. This results in building your innate signature talentsinto well developed strengths while experiencing a sense of well-being and increased self-awareness.
In his book, "GRIT," Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D., explains, "I used to be convinced that grit was just one of those qualities on a long list of stuff that everyone knows you need to succeed. I could not have been more wrong. GRIT isn't a nice-to-have item on the get-the-most-out-of-life list. It's the single most essential item on the list."
One of the main motives for writing the book is to mess with your head in a good way on your quest to craft an extraordinary life (business, family, team, education, relationships, etc). To help you radically rethink GRIT.
GRIT: Your capacity to dig deep, to do whatever it takes--especially struggle, sacrifice, even suffer--to achieve your most worthy goals.
Why GRIT?
GRIT Matters. Without it, nothing happens. Greatness suffocates. Dreams die. With it, nearly anything is possible.
GRIT Evolves. GRIT is like a rock you dig up with the toe of your boot on the trail. What looks at first to be minor and one-sided can be massive, deep, and multifaceted.
GRIT Trumps. On the job, GRIT has become Priority One. Ninety-eight percent of the 10,000 employers surveyed demand it over anything else--including skills and qualifications--in the people they seek to hire, retain, invest in, and promote.
GRIT Ignites. Your brightest ambitions, breakthrough ideas, compelling goals, disruptive innovations, fulfilling relationships, elevating possibilities--even your best-laid, most ingenious plans--utterly depend on GRIT.
GRIT Undergirds. It's the bedrock of relationships, progress, aspiration, achievement, and results.
GRIT Grows. Unlike a lot of traits, GRIT can be readily understood and measured, as well as permanently improved.
When it comes to GRIT and its consequences, leaders are the grand influencers and the great multipliers. In this way, they shape our course and history.
The Problem: Because of the inordinate amount of pressure exerted on leaders today, coupled with the business necessity of continually doing more with less, leaders have little or no time to hone their leadership skills.
Today's competitive global marketplace and the high number of retiring senior leaders is driving a great demand for a new generation of highly effective leaders. Yet, before you can lead others, you must have fundamental and proven disciplines as a basis to rely on for success.
Leaders must clearly define and paint an exciting path to the future, while providing ethical and logical reasons as to why they're moving in a specific direction. They must articulate a clear framework and provide a cogent message that delineates each individual's role in realizing the vision. This builds support and enthusiasm, creating a culture where people are aligned and eager to participate in achieving company goals.
The "Seven Disciplines of a Leader" by Jeff Wood is a book from the trenches...not a theoretical hodgepodge of data and ideas. These concepts and ideas are practical and easy to apply.
Both people in leadership in elite organizations and people in ordinary, everyday jobs experience the heat, pressure, reactivity, and corrosion of the crucible.
A crucible is a hardened ceramic vessel used to perform reactions that would shatter an ordinary Pyrex flask with too much heat, pressure, reactivity, corrosive-by-products. Heat, pressure, reactivity, corrosive by-products: sounds like work. Not every minute of every day, but often.
The threat of the crucible of work is always in the background, especially for leaders: those who have accepted heightened responsibility for others and for the performance of their organization; those who live with accountability for many variables that are out of their control; those who are tempered, in fact taught, to assert control using the tools of power and hierarchy at their disposal; those who face the possibility of very public faiure; and those who receive the often exaggerated rewards of success and are tempted to believe these rewards are owed to them.
For most leaders in an imperfect, broken world, the crucible is unavoidable. There is no opting out. Just when you think you've got everything calmed down, working smoothly, under control, all hell breaks loose and you're back in the crucible.
As a leader, how might you shape the crucible for others to something less harmful?
Instead of being deformed in the heat of the crucible, might a leader be purified and formed, like bronze, into something more valuable, more useful?
You are invited to reflect on these questions as they present themselves at the places and in the substance of your work. The premise is that the crucible is unavoidable and that the only way to direct the heat and pressure of the crucible toward something positive, toward formation, is by doing interior work.
So a leader's first work, the most important and enduring work, is interior work, to attend to what is happening in your own assumptions, even as they are being formed and reformed.
The new book, "LEADERSHIP IN THE CRUCIBLE OF WORK" by Sandy Shugart, PhD, provides an invitation to enter the conversation concerning how we form and are formed by our work.
