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 natural to wonder how change leaders are different than plain old leaders. In truth, they should be one in the same. Harvard Business Review says that one of the seven skills you need to thrive in the C-suite is change management.
Change leadership takes a different approach. It starts with, “How can I, as a leader, set our people up for success with this new thing that’s coming their way?”
While good change leadership needs project leaders to do their part, it requires enablement by executive leaders prior to the project team lifting a finger on the delivery work. It then requires ongoing nurturing and support (activation) during the implementation phase—which is owned by project leaders, grassroots influencers, and executives.
Change Leadership = Enabling + Activating People for Change
Three particular conditions have more influence on success than any other: Alignment, Design and Capacity where executive leaders own all three.
People need to know why a change is coming and why it is needed (alignment), the change needs to be intuitive and easy to understand (design), and the decks need to be cleared so people can focus on the change (capacity).
Over the ages, many famous thinkers have grappled with the choices people make and how these choices affect their lives. Indeed, the message is that choices are daring declarations that we are masters of our own fate.
Who am I?
Why is this question so difficult for people to answer?
One reason is that there is no single answer. We may see ourselves as shy when in full truth we are just introspective or careful or uninterested. To get a better understanding of who you are is to take a few self-assessments.
Knowing who you are and what you are meant to do gives you the energy to transform your life.
By completing one or more confidential self assessments in the area of personal concern, you may discover a number of things about yourself.
In highly developed countries, there is a growing percentage of people thinking about the meaning of 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 they want to live their life in a meaningful way.
Sooner or later, we all yearn to break out of our secure harbors.
Personal and business success starts with answering the question: "What should I do with my life?"
By analyzing yourself and discovering your life signature, you can focus your power to coordinate spirit, mind and body in living your purpose. The shortest route to living the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means.
Paying attention to how we live our lives is so natural that it is apparent everywhere. We see it in ordinary conversation when people tell each other. They discuss books they have read and movies they have seen. Every day they transmit the workings of their minds to the people around them. When knowing their life signature, they give an enhanced focus to their experiences in consciously steering their life.
Everything we’ve previously been taught about negotiation is wrong.
The real art of negotiation lies in mastering the intricacies of No, not Yes.
In “NEVER SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” by former FBI negotiator Chris Voss and co-author Tahl Raz offer a groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting approach to high-stakes negotiations that will give readers the competitive edge in any discussion---whether in the boardroom, at the dinner table, or at the car dealership.
Negotiation is the heart of collaboration. It makes conflict meaningful and productive. Negotiation is having the power to change the course of where your life is going.
Know that emotions aren’t obstacles, they are the means.
The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a coachwith a client. The coach pokes and prods to understand his client’s problems, and then turns the responses back onto the client to get him to go deeper and change his behavior. That’s exactly what good negotiators do.
Getting to this level of emotional intelligence demands opening up your senses, talking less, and listening more.
Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional back.
Once you have spotted an emotion you want to highlight, the next step is to label it aloud. Labels almost always begin with roughly the same words:
It seems like…
It sounds like…
It looks like…
When you phrase a label as a neutral statement of understanding, it encourages your counterpart to be responsive. Once you’ve thrown out a label, be quiet and listen. Let the label do its work.
Maneuver strategy has been used by the military since King Leonidas and Genghis Khan, yet businesses all too often neglect it.
In their new book, “OUTMANEUVER: OutThink, Don’t OutSpend”strategy and innovation consulting experts Jeffrey Phillips and Alex Verjovsky examine how maneuver strategies, based on speed, agility, insight and innovation win the most in any market at the least possible cost, for companies of any size, in any industry.
Unlike attrition, maneuver never seeks to attack an incumbent in head-to-head competition. Instead maneuver uses reconnaissance and insights to identify weaknesses and uses three strategies to attack those vulnerabilities:
Preemption: taking a valuable, unoccupied space before competitors are aware the space exists.
Dislocation: attacking an incumbent in a way that forces the opponent to fight with less than its full capabilities and on the attacker’s terms, causing the opponent to vacate part or all of a valuable position.
Disruption: upsetting an opponent’s detailed scheduling or planning, distraction an opponent from efficient execution, delaying a timely launch, creating confusion or havoc in an opponent’s capabilities.
OUTMANEUVER details this overlooked methodology; its focus on speed, agility, and innovation is the right strategy for the new emerging markets and companies of any size.
To identify gaps or weaknesses in intangible factors, evaluate four categories:
Brand
Human capital
Intellectual property
Culture
Once you’ve completed your analysis across the four factors, you must also ask several important questions before proceeding. These questions ensure that you rank and prioritize the competitor’s vulnerabilities effectively, ensuring you highlight the weaknesses where you have the best opportunity to win.
Once the selection of a maneuver strategy is complete, you can move on to the selection of appropriate tactics, choosing from positional, temporal, functional, psychological and informational tactics.
There’s a leadership crisis in American politics and business—a crisis that extends around the world.
What’s the problem?
We find the training and managing of leadership is broken. It’s stuck inside an outdated industrial revolution model. Yet, today, we live in a world driven by the constant change of the digital information revolution.
Former top-tier political consultants, Scott Miller and David Morey, who could boast dozens of presidential wins around the world, have tooled their strategies to the business world and built the “Campaign Model” for Apple’s Steven Jobs.
Today, the model of “Change Leadership” versus “Bigness Leadership” is an approach built for these turbulent times by Google, Walt Disney Company and others.
“The information revolution has created a “change environment” that drives everything. Challenge and opportunity are flung at us constantly. But most leadership models are stuck in the pre-information age,” argues Scott Miller. “Ninety percent of CEOs in the U.S. and around the world are not prepared for the environment in which they operate.”
If you want to become a leader today, whether you are leading a short-term project, a startup, or a global corporation, we already know the theme of your campaign for leadership. The theme will be change.
All markets are transforming today. Most companies are either transforming or need to start transforming in a hurry. That makes the rule of this age quite simple: lead change or be changed. Getting behind change means losing. Leading change means winning. If you’re not transforming the markets you’re in, than someone else is doing it.
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.
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In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profit and nonprofits; and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations.
In “AN EVERYONE CULTURE: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization” authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey argue that this is the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. In this increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex world, organizations need to expect more, not less, of themselves and the people who work for them. After all, is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their time and energy?
Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs) will best prosper when they are deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow. This means more than consigning “people development” to high-potential leadership development programs, executive coaching, or once-a-year retreats. Deep alignment means fashioning an organizational culture in which support of people’s ongoing development is woven into the daily fabric of working life and visible in the company’s regular operations, daily routines, and conversations.
If you are like most people, more wary of feeling vulnerable, ashamed, and unworthy—especially at work---you might find yourself feeling alarmed soon after you enter. That might be the case especially if you happen to be a leader in an organization and you feel you don’t have the luxury of being vulnerable. None of us chooses or decides to be alarmed. It happens automatically. Once alarmed, any of us will, as the neuroscientists have taught us, just as automatically protection ourselves.
The important thing is for you to realize that when these thoughts arise automatically, you’re not considering them. You’re not even “having” them. Rather, they are having you. They are taking over.
A DDO is something different from an accelerated version of business as usual and from other admirable emerging departures. A DDO represents, instead, a rethinking of the very place of people development in organizational life.
DDO is all about the difference between a “fixed” mind-set and the “growth” mind-set. No real growth occurs without first experiencing some limitation at one’s core. Until you begin to question even your fixed, taken-for-granted talents, you have not fully derived the benefits of being in a DDO.
The closest thing, in book form, to a quick DDO immersion is what you might see if you were plunked down in the middle of one of these DDO companies experimenting to take responsibility for the workings of our minds so that we can stay present, so that we can stay at work.
The myth of individualism can negatively affect our chances for success.
Leaders in new positions often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.
Consider that four out of ten newly promoted managers and executives fail within 18 months of starting new jobs, according to research by Manchester, Inc, a leadership development firm in Bala Cynwyd, PA
Two out of every five new CEOs fail in the first 18 months (HBR, January 2005).
Whether you’re navigating your way on a new team, expanding your leadership role, or just trying to get heard in a meeting, you’re facing the kind of workplace challenge we all run into sooner or later; you need to elevate your performance.
Leaders and managers today are being asked not only to be the experts in their particular fields but to coach and develop the performances of others. For most, it’s part of the job description itself, and it’s a big challenge.
Here are the top ten tenets of successful coaching:
Look at the scene: Pay attention to your coachee’s character—both in the situation they want help with and in how they talk to you about it.
Direct the scene: Ask yourself, what could this scene be? With your coachee, consider the different options; be creative.
Keep it Real: See the real person before you, not who you wish they were.
Be Curious: Ask genuine questions that help you get to know them, how they think and feel.
Collaborate: Resist the urge to always provide an answer. Practice being creative and relish the process of discovery together.
Yes, And: Accept your coachee’s offers and build on them.
Yes-and Yourself: Notice your reactions to your coachee; work to use them constructively and creatively.
Build Character: Create your coach character and pay attention to your style and performance.
Get Help: Helping someone else to grow can be challenging, and you’ll need intellectual and emotional support to do it. And being a good seeker of direction your self means that you know what it takes to grow.
Bond: Make it a priority to build your relationship with your coachee and create an environment for learning, development, exploration and discovery.
Coaching is first and foremost a creative act. What this means is that every coaching situation and every coaching relationship brings its own offers and nuances and opportunities and challenges.
“The Voice of the Workplace,” heard from nearly 500 business leaders, HR leaders and consultants about whether or not they agreed with two key statements:
1) “Providing an open forum for employees to offer candid feedback is essential for organizational improvement,” 2) “Negative feedback from employees can be useful to help an organization improve.”
An overwhelming 96% responded positively to the first statement, and 97% to the second. The responses were fairly consistent across various sizes of organization, job titles, and geographic regions.
“We were surprised to see almost unanimous agreement that negative feedback from employees can be useful,” said Michael Papay, CEO, Waggl. “Over the years, we’ve seen many instances of companies that have either ignored or attempted to eradicate negative feedback, usually with less than optimal results. But this data indicates that attitudes are shifting, with business and HR leaders alike becoming more open to candid feedback, and more receptive about how to work with it to make their organizations stronger.”
“The Voice of the Workplace” was sent to HR leaders, business leaders and consultants through the Northern California Human Resources Association (NCHRA), InsiderHub, and Executive Networks and over a two-week period of time from March 8-23, 2016.
Waggl also asked the open-ended question, “What is the most constructive way for organizations to handle negative feedback from employees?”
Here are the top three answers that were crowd-sourced with over 3,000 votes on Waggl:
“Provide a response to those giving feedback to indicate that it was heard and understood; then describe action to be taken -- this may include no action, but providing feedback indicates that the input was carefully considered. Further information may clarify the situation about which negative feedback occurred. Responses must be respectful, and not defensive.”
“Listen, understand the real issue, probe into further information if needed to fully understand, and then address the feedback directly, honestly, and in a timely manner. Then ask if that helps or if there is further negative feedback.”
“Acknowledge and address openly and honestly - be transparent whenever possible - communicate, communicate, communicate.”
