Coaching Tip: The Leadership Blog

What Does It Mean to "Show Up"?

You determine how you want to show up and what you’re going to create in your life.

You have the impact. You have power. Your fate starts with taking accountability for what you’re creating and for owning your impact.

The first thing, showing up, involves the obvious: your presence, your body language, your tone of voice, what you say and do, and your ability to simply get stuff done---to lead. Showing up also involves the intangible, not so obvious things: your levels of accountability and ownership, and your ability to make someone feel seen and valued—to be.

When you turn and face the stuff you don’t like, when you finally admit to the things that you’re not loving, where you’re falling down, where you’re miserable, the skies open up. Things can breathe. You can shift them. There is no cure like turning inward, giving yourself a bit of TLC, taking the situation by the horns, getting into action, and asking for help where needed.

Now that you have a strong sense of where you are, it’s time to dive into how you show up well and how you set yourself up to do so. Most people think their skills and capabilities are what create their impact, but in reality a much larger part of their impact lies in their presence: being intentional about the energetic presence you project, and setting yourself up for success to show up well through intention, healthy positive energy, and solid presence.

Source: Anese Cavanaugh: Contagious Culture: Show Up, Set the Tone, and Intentionally Create an Organization that Thrives

      

 Self-Coaching Books in ebook or paperback editions:                       

 Can't Get Enough Leadership

 Develop Leadership Skills: A Mobile Reference Guide

 Ask the Coach  

Innovative Leadership Insight

By Guest Author George Barbee

What if your organization isn’t loaded with geniuses like Steve Jobs?

The bad news is that there are only very few people in the Steve Jobs genius category. The good news? There’s everyone else.

Most of us are far more innovative than we give ourselves credit for. In my experience, it is teachable and learnable—and that is very good news.

Throughout my career, I have observed people who could stretch themselves beyond their self-perceived limitations and attain a far greater level of innovation than they initially thought they could. These observations inspired me to write 63 Innovation Nuggets (for aspiring innovators).

I noticed that innovation is a “WE” thing, not just an “I” thing. And that we must create and surround ourselves with a positive environment—and learn from one another.

No matter your position in an organization, a path toward innovation can start with the “Art of Observing,” which is Nugget # 19 in the book. Most successful innovators have a keen sense of observation—and it is this sense that helps them think and act more innovatively. Everyone has the ability to become a keen observer, so put yourself in “listen and receive mode.” Record your observations. Practice observing and taking notes daily if possible. Over time, your skills will improve.

The key is taking notes but also sharing and comparing notes with colleagues. We know through experience that this practice helps lead organizations toward overcoming what we call “thinkers cramp” in order to attain greater innovation.

After mastering observation, we can then discuss how to transfer observations (Nugget #23), across organizations, different categories, industries, and eventually countries. This is what innovative learning is all about: discovering these practical, experience-proven nuggets and making them one’s own.

So what’s in this for rising innovation leaders? It is re-enforcing for leaders to know that employees across the organization are capable, and that it’s simply a matter of encouraging, training, and unlocking it.

It is also essential for people in the middle of an organization to have access to top leadership and take the initiative to generate ideas and execute them.

This bonding from the “top down” and “middle up” leadership becomes a common thread in almost any size organization and in almost every industry.

The genius is there, sometimes latent, but it can be encouraged, discovered, and taught.

Make this a resolution: self-discover your innovative genius and bring it to your organization.

About the Author

Barbee’s 45 year innovative business career took him across 40 countries. As an entrepreneur, he founded 3 companies and worked with a number of Fortune 100 companies like Gillette, IBM, GE, PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and PepsiCo. The common thread in his small and large company experience, as well as the last 15 years teaching innovation to graduate students at UVa’s Darden School of Business, is that innovation skills can be learned and taught.

More information on George Barbee as an author, speaker, and consultant is available at www.InnovationNuggets.com. 

George E. L. Barbee: 63 Innovation Nuggets for aspiring innovators

Self-Coaching to Heighten Self-Discovery

  What is Coaching?

When a person faces a challenge and becomes stuck, he or she may seek the services of a personal coach. Once this commitment is made, the person begins to experience a different, more hopeful, world as his or her perceptions evolve in meeting the personal challenge.

Click to listen to this interview on What is Coaching? 

As powerful and effective as professional coaching can be, it is only affordable to less than one percent of the workforce. 

 

What is Coached to Success? Coached to Success is dedicated to providing insightful self-coaching to help you achieve your life goals.  John G. Agno shares his decades of professional coaching and consulting knowledge to create a better life for many through proprietary self-coaching guides; delivered to your smart phone, tablet, eReader, and computer or via low-cost paperback books. Agno knows what caused the strain, stress and frustration of his successful clients in order to help them create effective and profitable solutions.  The purpose of Coached to Success is to communicate these unique insights in blog postings and self-help books at prices so low that as many people as possible are able to afford and use them in their personal and professional lives.  These powerful self-coaching solutions can deliver life-changing possibilities for those willing to allow their perceptions to evolve.   What is professional coaching and how can it help you?    For the answer to that question, download and listen to this MP3 recording of a recent interview.  Coach Agno knows that sometimes our thoughts aren't crystal clear and we can be diverted from our goals.  Agno's job is to coach people to greater awareness, increased clarity and focus, develop your signature talents into strengths and achieve a sense of well-being which often translates into higher compensation, job satisfaction and the practical use of their skills and abilities.  Agno believes that every executive needs a coach.  However, the purpose of Coached to Success is to help those of you, who don't now have an executive coach but need to pay attention to your intentions and get to where you want to be.  Please keep up with and "Like" us at: https://www.facebook.com/CoachedtoSuccess.info

Related articles

Self-Coaching Leadership Insights

Do You Have a Mentor and Personal Coach?

What is Happiness?

When a person faces a challenge and becomes stuck, he or she may seek the services of a personal coach. Once this commitment is made, the person begins to experience a different, more hopeful, world as his or her perceptions evolve in meeting the personal challenge.

Click to listen to this interview on What is Coaching? 

As powerful and effective as professional coaching can be, it is only affordable to less than one percent of the workforce. 

 

What is Coached to Success? Coached to Success is dedicated to providing insightful self-coaching to help you achieve your life goals.  John G. Agno shares his decades of professional coaching and consulting knowledge to create a better life for many through proprietary self-coaching guides; delivered to your smart phone, tablet, eReader, and computer or via low-cost paperback books. Agno knows what caused the strain, stress and frustration of his successful clients in order to help them create effective and profitable solutions.  The purpose of Coached to Success is to communicate these unique insights in blog postings and self-help books at prices so low that as many people as possible are able to afford and use them in their personal and professional lives.  These powerful self-coaching solutions can deliver life-changing possibilities for those willing to allow their perceptions to evolve.   What is professional coaching and how can it help you?    For the answer to that question, download and listen to this MP3 recording of a recent interview.  Coach Agno knows that sometimes our thoughts aren't crystal clear and we can be diverted from our goals.  Agno's job is to coach people to greater awareness, increased clarity and focus, develop your signature talents into strengths and achieve a sense of well-being which often translates into higher compensation, job satisfaction and the practical use of their skills and abilities.  Agno believes that every executive needs a coach.  However, the purpose of Coached to Success is to help those of you, who don't now have an executive coach but need to pay attention to your intentions and get to where you want to be.  Please keep up with and "Like" us at: https://www.facebook.com/CoachedtoSuccess.info

RetainTop Leadership Talent

There are two main ways to ensure leadership continuity and fill critically important positions. These may be classified as traditional and alternative approaches. Each can have important implications for succession planning and management (SP&M).

Moving people into an organization is associated with recruitment and selection. Hiring off the street is one way to find successors for key positions. However, people hired from outside represent a gamble.

Moving people up in an organization is associated with upward mobility, advancement, and increased responsibility. Succession planning and management has long been linked with this approach more than any other.

Promotion from within has distinct advantages: It sustains employee morale, and it smoothes transitions by ensuring that key positions are filled by those whose personalities, philosophies, and skills are already known to others in the organization. However, experts advise limiting the percentage of positions filled through internal promotion.

Alternative approaches are probably being increasingly used as managers in cost-sensitive organizations struggle to meet SP&M challenges while finding themselves restricted in the external hiring and internal promoting that they may do.

An alternative approach might be called organizational redesign. When a vacancy occurs in a key position, decision makers do not automatically move someone into that place; rather, they break up the work duties and reallocate them across the remaining key positions or people.

A succession planning and management program is meant to ensure leadership continuity in key positions, retain and develop intellectual and knowledge capital for the future, and encourage individual advancement. The continued survival of the organization depends on having the right people in the right places at the right times.

Covering best practices, current trends, and the latest technology, the fifth edition of “Effective Succession Planning” is an indispensable resource for any organization concerned with retaining the accumulated wisdom of its most value employees. Packed with enlightening case studies and practical guidance, the book shows how to: identify competencies and clarify organizational values, develop and retain top talent, assess current needs and future resources, and plan for and quickly fill crucial vacancies at all levels.

Source: William J. Rothwell: Effective Succession Planning: Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent from Within

 

      

 Self-Coaching Books in ebook or paperback editions:                       

 Can't Get Enough Leadership

 Develop Leadership Skills: A Mobile Reference Guide

 Ask the Coach  

 

Executive Order — Strengthening the Senior Executive Service

President Obama issued an executive order today which the White House said will help to strengthen the Senior Executive Service (SES). 

The executive order, titled Strengthening the Senior Executive Service (included below), claims that it “continues to support executive departments and agencies to develop and implement a comprehensive, integrated, and strategic focus on diversity and inclusion as a key component of the recruitment, hiring, retention, and development of their SES cadre.”

Section 1. Policy. It is in the national interest to facilitate career executive continuity between administrations; to increase senior leadership attention to, and involvement in, executive recruitment; to reduce unnecessary burdens on applicants for executive positions; and to efficiently document demonstrated executive experience.

Section 3.(iv) Establish a formal Executive Onboarding Program informed by OPM’s Enhanced Executive Onboarding Model and Government-Wide Executive Onboarding Framework, which shall provide critical support and guidance to executives through their first year of service in new positions, consistent with guidance to be issued by OPM no later than 60 days after the date of this order. Onboarding shall be provided for career and non-career SES, SL and ST employees, and SES-equivalent positions.

Section 5. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) the functions of the Director of OMB relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals. (b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations. 

(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

BARACK OBAMA

Executive Onboarding Tips

For an executive taking a new role as a corporate leader, the first 100 days are "a temporary state of incompetence" when you know the least.

You are advised not to "hit the ground running" but assess the elusive corporate culture at your new level and begin to learn what matters around you.  Engage in substantive one-on-one meetings with others to elicit information about the business, build trust and test how engaged each person really is.

During this onboarding period it is valuable to have an outside coach with an independent viewpoint to brainstorm with in discussing what you are seeing and how you might best respond to each situation.

For the onboarding business case, go to: ExecutiveCoaching.us.com

Source: You're in Charge--Now What? by Thomas J. Neff and James M. Citrin

Partnership for Public Service President and CEO Max Stier said in a statement:

Today, the president and his administration took significant steps to strengthen this all important federal leadership corps. Investing in how agencies recruit, retain and develop their leaders will fundamentally change how our government works. We commend the administration for its leadership, and we look forward to helping the White House implement these much-needed reforms.

 

American International Group (AIG) Turnaround

American International Group--known by its universally reviled initials, AIG--had almost taken down the entire global economy as a result of the role of one of its divisions, AIG Financial Products, in the calamitous sub-prime mortgage market.  Now, it was reeling under the weight of the astronomical $182 billion in bailout funds it owed the taxpayers.  The company was in such disarray that it had burned through four CEOs in four years, the last one after a humiliating dressing down by Congress.

Robert Benmosche would be CEO No. 5 in that line.

In the course of telling his story, he's going to impart many leadership lessons.  These are ideas gleaned from a life in business--with an emphasis as much on the life part as the business.

When Bob Benmosche took the helm of AIG as CEO in August 2009, the embattled insurance giant was reeling under the weight of the $182 billion in bailout funds it owed American taxpayers.  With the fate of the company hanging in the balance, Benmosche orchestrated one of the most unexpected corporate comebacks in modern history, overseeing AIG's full repayment of the bailout and return to profitability in three years.

The significance of Benmosche's achievement was largely overlooked in the midst of widespread economic hardship, crushing unemployment, and public anger--until now.

Called "an American hero" by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Benmosche fought relentlessly for the future of AIG, and succeeded against the odds to make his vision for a bailout payback a reality.

Source: "GOOD FOR THE MONEY: My Fight to Pay Back America" is Benmosche's first-person account of his tenure as CEO of AIG, and includes never-before-reported details of how he accomplished the impossible.

Related articles

Employee Engagement

Funny Business

Your Ability to Adapt

Education plus experience once guaranteed a successful career, but no more.

Today, success depends on your ability to adapt.  You must be agile, willing to adjust your professional expectations, and able to respond quickly to opportunities and threats.

It's not enough to know how to manage common work/life challenges, you must also deal with the uncommon ones. THINK LIKE AN ENTREPRENEUR, ACT LIKE A CEO gives you proven, easy, go-to techniques for handling even the biggest career surprises, one step at a time.

Your reputation as a potential leader may take years to fully develop, but it begins long before you manage a team or have a lofty title.  Even when you're just starting out, your leadership reputation influences how much people trust you and whether they want to work with you.

The full scope of your personal brand includes the impression other people have about you, from your clothes to your technical skills. The leadership component of your brand is particularly important because it's close to your core values.  If you have a strong leadership brand, other people will have faith in your ability to deliver a high level.

Source:   Beverly E. Jones: Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO: 50 Indispensable Tips to Help You Stay Afloat, Bounce Back, and Get Ahead at Work

 

The Motive Spectrum

 

 

Why people participate in an activity affects their performance in that activity. The motive affects their performance.

Even though many organizations rely on money to drive performance, most of us know from our personal lives that motivation is much more complicated. There is a spectrum of reasons why people do their jobs (or lose weight). Understanding that spectrum is the key to creating the highest levels of performance.

THE DIRECT MOTIVES

PLAY

Play occurs when you’re engaging in an activity simply because you enjoy doing it. Play is what compels you to take up hobbies, from solving crossword puzzles to making scrapbooks to mixing music.

PURPOSE

A step away from the work itself is the purpose motive. The purpose motive occurs when you do an activity because you value the outcome of the activity (versus the activity itself). You may or may not enjoy the work you do, but you value its impact.

POTENTIAL

The third motive is potential. The potential motive occurs when you find a second order outcome (versus a direct outcome) of the work that aligns with your values or beliefs. You do the work because it will eventually lead to something you believe is important, such as your personal goals.

THE INDIRECT MOTIVES

EMOTIONAL PRESSURE

The first indirect motive, emotional pressure, occurs when emotions such as disappointment, guilt, or shame compel you to perform an activity. These emotions are related to your beliefs (your self-perception) and external forces (the judgments of other people).

ECONOMIC PRESSURE

Economic pressure is when you do an activity solely to win a reward or avoid punishment. The motive is separate from the work itself and separate from your own identity.

INERTIA

The most indirect motive of all is inertia. With inertia, your motive for working is so distant from the work itself that you can no longer say where it comes from---you do what you do simply because you did it yesterday. This leads to the worst performance of all.

WHY WE WORK

1.  Direct motives typically increase performance and indirect motives typically decrease it.

2. The more directly connected the motive is to the activity itself, the better performance becomes. Play is the motive that is closest to the work itself, so it is the most powerful. Purpose is one step removed, so it is the second strongest. Potential is two or more steps removed from the activity, so it is the third strongest.

Source:  PRIMED TO PERFORM: How to Build The Highest Performing Cultures Through The Science of Total Motivation

Related articles

Cyberloafing at Work

The Logic in Our Emotions

Team Building Emotional Bonds

Financial Markets are a Psychological Phenomenon

Interview with Robert Prechter

By Elliott Wave International

Watch this 2-minute video from 2011 where Robert Prechter talks about his developing theory on finance with Douglass Lodmell for The Mind Of Money series.

Since then, Bob has been hard at work on his new book about his now fully developed theory on finance (scheduled for completion in 2016).

---

Learn What REALLY Moves the Markets In just 12 minutes, Bob Prechter reveals eye-opening evidence that shows external factors -- be they interest rates, war or peace, oil prices, inflation, quantitative easing, even terrorism -- do not in fact regulate financial markets as most experts claim. Watch your free video now >>

This article was syndicated by Elliott Wave International and was originally published under the headline Financial Markets are a Psychological Phenomenon. EWI is the world's largest market forecasting firm. Its staff of full-time analysts led by Chartered Market Technician Robert Prechter provides 24-hour-a-day market analysis to institutional and private investors around the world.

 

Related articles

How -- and Why -- the Markets Fool Investors

What's Bigger Than a $1.4 Billion Mortgage Ratings Scandal?

The Bear Market Meter is Running